


Blue

by wawalux



Series: Blue [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Action, Action & Romance, Action/Adventure, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood and Injury, Daredevil (TV) Spoilers, Drama & Romance, Eventual Romance, Falling In Love, Fights, First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Frank Castle Angst, Friendship/Love, Hospitalization, Hurt Frank Castle, Hurt Matt Murdock, Idiots in Love, Kissing, Male-Female Friendship, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Mind Manipulation, Multi, Original Character(s), POV Claire, POV First Person, POV Foggy Nelson, POV Frank Castle, POV Karen Page, POV Matt Murdock, POV Original Character, Rescue, Romance, Romantic Fluff, Rough Sex, Sex, Shower Sex, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Slow Romance, Smut, Thought Projection, Waiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:54:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 44,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25265680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wawalux/pseuds/wawalux
Summary: The devil was ready for the war that I had stolen. But as I watched him strike in the sea of black, I wondered if he was really ready to die.The way I saw it, there had only ever been one choice. And this time, I allowed it to be mine.I let my veins run with fire and the world turned blue as I staked my claim into the battle.Death stalked forward, on beat at the time.A spin-off from Daredevil S2E11. A horrified daredevil rescues the kids from the Hand. But when the ninjas come to Metro-General to steal them back, one of the girls hides away. Matt takes her under her wing, hoping to gain information following her recovery. But he doesn't realize that the exposure to chemicals has given her powers of her own.Narrated from the perspective of each of our favorite characters.
Relationships: Frank Castle/Matt Murdock, Matt Murdock/Claire Temple, Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios, Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock/Karen Page
Series: Blue [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1864486
Comments: 21
Kudos: 18





	1. Hope

**Author's Note:**

> I am putting this here because it has to go somewhere. I do not own any of the Marvel characters or story plots. Blue, on the other hand, was born from my own misfiring neurons and she will continue to belong to me, and only to me, until further notice.
> 
> Readers, dear readers, if you have stuck with Blue for this long, then you are the true heroes of my story. Leave a review, send me a sign, show me you are there. You'll make my day.

Here's the thing about captivity in the dark: It makes time slow to one interminable moment of agony, and years blur into a second. Time becomes everything and ceases to exist, instants counted by the constant sluggish drip dripping of the blood draining from your body, the only change being whatever new chemical they concocted to shove into your veins.

Fire is the only constant, burning at your insides, coursing through your mind, making your veins turn into a charred railway. And the darkness of course, always, pressing into all of your senses, becoming one with the suffocating silence, the occasional moans and shifts of posture, the clanking of plastic tubes against metal bars, until you know it has seeped into your insides, tainting your organs, staining your muscles, blotting out your thoughts, and all you can do is drown in black, black, black.

Fire and darkness. Blackness and pain. Is time even moving as we burn?

.

You learn to stop screaming eventually, we all did. Not that you want to. But the thrashing and screaming and begging and crying doesn't do any good. It doesn't quench the fire or light the darkness. It travels into the empty air, an echo of despair.

.

We tried to fight them at first. We'd yank out the IV ports, rattle the cages, claw at the fire travelling under our skin. We kicked and punched and scratched when they came close. We screamed until our throats locked and our eardrums throbbed. We willed our veins to close, tried to force our blood to stay put. It was ours. Not theirs.

We knew we were succeeding when we were tied up, gagged, hit, sedated. Punches coming from the darkness, the only warning a hiss of breath before the inevitable blow, and hot white pain exploding on our heads, our stomachs, our ribs, like fireworks echoing dully against the fire in our veins. Bones snapping when our fingers searched the darkness to unhook the port from our arms, our legs, our hands. Dirty rags shoved roughly in our mouths, muffling the cries of anger that sounded more like helpless sobs of pain. Pinpricks of light, like dancing stars, floating in front of our eyes before the artificial cold dragged us down once again.

Like everything else, it did no good. The chemicals went in, the blood drained out, the fire raged on in our ravaged bodies. Fighting led to additional pain, but it didn't slow them down.

Eventually we understood. It was theirs, not ours. Our blood, our body, it was all theirs.

Their blood. Their body. Theirs for the taking.

.

The quiet seeped into our minds, cold and thorough, cancelling out hope and despair. We became ragged dolls, blood farms, chemical hotels. We stopped trying to open our eyes and forgot about the world we had left behind. We banished all memories and thoughts and let our hearts beat as one with the pain, and the dripping, as we sagged against our cages.

One beat, drip. Two beats, drop.

I prayed for the end.

.

There were rewards for good behaviour, eventually. If you didn't fight, if you didn't moan, if you held out your wrist when they came with the needles.

They came in the shape of small paper sachets, handed out like candies to good children.

I ran my fingers against the packet once, and felt an outline etched against the paper. It was curvy, like an 's' or maybe a question mark? I didn't care. Curiosity was a luxury I could no longer afford.

Fine granules crunched against my fingertips as I pressed the paper. I swished the packet around and felt fine sand follow my movements, akin to dust. A sweet floral scent hit my nostrils, muffled in metal and strong chemicals.

Drugs, more drugs. Forcing us into submission, leading us to addiction. I gagged and threw the packet in a corner of my cage.

The others were not so dismissive. I heard lips smacking as they tasted the powder, some forced sniffing, dirty fingers rubbing against abused gums. The inevitable sighs of pleasure, of reprieve against the agony and night that was carved into our souls.

I didn't blame them. Or maybe I wasn't capable of blame anymore.

The rewards made the others desperate, pliable. I swear I heard one of them say: "Thank you," once. Those two words plunged me in a fit of despair so acute that I could only compare it to the pain of mourning. Except I was mourning myself and that last rivulet of hope that had been so desperately clinging to my heart.

I waited for the silence to steal me away.

.

Whispers stroked our eardrums in the stillness. Soft voices, soothing. It was hard to make out the words at first, our ears so attuned to hearing nothing that small noises rumbled like thunder. I felt the others shift in their cages in response.

The voices got closer: "Good, good, you are doing so good."

The words broke through the nothing clouding my brain. I felt them bounce in my skull, rattling my senses, but I couldn't still them long enough to make sense of them. I moved my hands to my ears, longing for the quiet.

Fingers at my wrist, old, frail, like parchment. A touch that felt too loud. My mind flooded with a glimpse of a dragon shaped like a question mark. A needle plunged into my IV port, another chemical. My wrist released, the image of the dragon dissolving like ink in water.

More noise, warbling: "You are part of a greater good now. Your life finally has purpose."

Words were just sharpness fluttering in my ears, teasing my mind for fleeting moments before I could understand their meaning. I pressed my palms harder against my eardrums, shutting them out.

The chemical was new, different. It stung like needles, like liquefied jellyfish coursing through my arm. My veins itched in response, fighting the army of fire ants crawling under my skin. I moved my fingers and scratched at the port, at my arms, at my neck, frantically, desperately. They were gaining speed, slick and fast, scorching their way to my heart.

Gloved hands on my wrists, binding them to the metal around me.

Careful chiding: "No, no. You are doing so good," mixed with the scent of rubber.

I let my head rest against the coolness of the iron bars, trying to ignore the scalding scuttle in my veins.

.

It wasn't the sound of footsteps that roused me, but their urgency.

It had been seconds, days or weeks since the voices had broken through the fog with warnings of: "Almost ready. They are almost ready." The words had rang with a finality that even I, so engrossed in my torpor, couldn't ignore. An end was coming. What end, I wasn't sure. Or perhaps I didn't want to know.

Almost ready. Almost ready. Almost ready.

Every moment since I'd heard them, the syllables had played on a continuous loop in my mind.

Almost ready. I could feel every one of my emaciated limbs, weak, drugged, tired, cold.

Almost ready. The fire in my veins burned hotter, heating my insides, drawing perspiration from my skin.

Almost ready. My heart pounded against my ribs. I could feel it shake my whole frame.

Almost ready. I smelled the scent of captivity, of soiled clothes, sweat, blood and fear, of metal and punishment and desperation.

Almost ready. No. Not almost. I was awake. I was ready.

The silence pressed against my eardrums, except it wasn't quiet anymore. I let my ears wonder beyond the shifting in the cages and the glugging of the blood, searching in the dark. There it was again, that scuttling, that sound of…pounding? Muffled voices coming from above. Someone crying in pain. Footsteps stomping down some stairs. The heavy clang of a metal door opening in the distance.

More than one body shifted in response, some even sticking their IV port out of the cage in a desperate attempt to earn themselves one more reward.

A cool blast of air seeped through my thin t-shirt and made me shiver. I inhaled greedily, the million scents making my already clouded mind more dizzy. I struggled to understand what was real or just in my head. The waft could have been just a memory of freedom. I suppressed the thought.

Footsteps continued our way, heavy and light, curious but hesitant. I tried to search through the fog to understand if that had been a normal pattern, but my mind was unhelpful, pounding, my memories full of black.

The footsteps were close now, stopping in between the cages. Hands playing with the tubes. More drugs? Was it time? Was this the next step? The end?

I placed a hand on the metal bar nearest to me, squeezing tight, trying to let the coldness of the metal seep into my palm. I needed the fire in my veins to quench so I could focus, so I could think.

The footsteps had stilled, but I could sense the presence of someone standing in our vicinity. Their body heat radiated towards us in waves, and I could taste sweat, leather and blood. Again, I couldn't remember if that was odd.

I opened my eyes and shut them just as quickly. The faint light coming from the open door was enough to scald my irises, sending scattered images of rays of light, metal bars and a silhouette, head tilted, standing by our cages. I squeezed the bar tighter in my palm and tried squinting through the sting, opening my eyelids just a crack, searching through the blur of tears. The image of a man, tall, the colour of blood, seeped through the needles piercing my eyeballs. I wasn't sure if the redness was real or my eyes had started to bleed. The stinging was so bad that either was possible.

"I'll…I'll get you out of here," the figure said, his voice deep, his whisper too loud as he fidgeted with the tubes.

And then the air was pierced with the screaming of a desperate man: "My son! My son! What have they done to my son!"

I cringed against the noise, shuffling further into my cage, letting the freezing bars press against my back, palms flying to shield my ears and eyes slammed shut.

It hurt, the loud hurt, the light hurt, the drugs hurt.

I searched for the quiet in my brain, the muffling kind that had kept me hidden in a corner of my mind all this time. But I couldn't remember where it was, the fog so thick in my brain, the pain sharp. The burning only intensified when a new fire started burning in my gut, more scorching than the rest, fuelled by the man's continued cries of: "My son!"

I clasped my palms against my ears until the pressure hurt, but this man's relief and love and desperation was so loud that I could almost taste it.

I felt my frame shaking with suppressed sobs before I realised that the new fire was no fire, the pain so acute because my body had recognised that it was a feeling that had to be removed, erased. Because hope was the most dangerous of all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bear with me. Matt and Claire are just around the corner.


	2. The warning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I had enough shit in my life without this. So of course when he came into the ER encased in his devil suit and asked me to take in the zombie-people and to do it secretly, I said yes. 
> 
> Because I was an idiot. Damn me. Damn him. Damn all of it.

_Blue_

They came in a blur of sound. An army of footsteps invading our hell, a flurry of movements, their voices impressive, thundering orders through the dark, the clanking of opening cages echoing in our silence.

Everything urgent, get them out, get them free, go, go, go.

Every noise cracked my skull in two. I kept my ears shut and cringed in a corner of my cage.

Make it stop.

A pair of footsteps circled my cage, considering me.

"Hey! Hey! Can you hear me?" a man's voice boomed from above. I let the words reverberate through my frame, but didn't move.

Crinkling of heavy fabric, the voice now closer: "Hey! It's ok. We've got you. Everything will be ok."

We? Who's we?

Gloved hands at my wrist felt for my pulse, the warm touch scalding me after so much time in the cold.

A waft of a man's cologne, then more movement, pulling at my wrists, my ankles. Needles came out of my skin, replaced by a warm trail of wetness. Sandpaper fabric pressed against the bleeding. Plastic tubes sagged, dripping, useless. A continuous stream of reassurance, of: "it's ok, you are ok."

Metal snapped, growling in protest. Plastic on my face suffocating me with cold, sweet air. My lungs turned to ice and wheezed in protest, the concentrated air freezing my thoughts, clearing the fog.

No. No. I don't want this. I want to sleep.

I lifted a deadened limb and tried to remove the plastic from my face. I couldn't feel my fingers. A warm gloved pressure stopped me. "No. No. It's ok. You are ok."

More questions: "Can you hear me? Hey! Can you stand? Can you walk?"

The words made no sense in my jumbled brain. I considered removing the plastic again and then realised his hand was still on my wrist. I hung limp, swaying with the fog in my mind, eyes shut in protest.

A second of hesitation, a shrug, and confident arms pulled me away from the hard cell floor. A grunt of effort as pressure lifted me, strong arms under my knees and on my back, my body suddenly cradled against hard waterproof fabric, my ear beside a heartbeat that wasn't mine, my arms cutting through the air with every step.

Another grunt to adjust my weight. Fabric shifted in response and a bare wrist grazed softly against my skin. Glimpses of a life that wasn't mine flooded before my eyes.

A golden band slipped onto the finger of a radiant blonde bride with tears in her eyes.

A pregnancy test with two blue bars in the middle of a ceramic basin.

The heartbeat of a bloodied man drifting away into the night.

The images didn't make any sense. I tried to shake my head in response, my movements so weak they translated into trembling. More shifting, the contact broken. I sighed in response.

Cold air greeted us like a slap as the arms placed me onto a plastic covered mattress, my weight making the frame squeak and creak. I didn't have time to consider moving before a heavy blanket was wrapped around me, the weight enough to bind me in place. Bright lights and noises continued hacking at by brain, colours piercing through my closed eyelids. I squeezed my eyes shut and let myself drown into the softness until I disappeared.

.

_Claire_

I thought I'd seen it all when I witnessed our city being torn to shreds by aliens, of all things. It should've been enough to accept men turning into big green monsters to fight them back, or crazy ass norse Gods with perfect bodies and swinging hammers. I even made the effort to accommodate a stubborn blind vigilante with super senses into my reality. But this? This nightmare straight from a zombie apocalypse movie with kids with bloodwork that didn't even have a place in the periodic table? THIS was where I had to draw the line.

Damn that man and his beautiful vacant eyes. Damn that tight ass and the way he said: "Claire."

I had enough shit in my life without _this_. So of course when he came into the ER encased in his devil suit and asked me to take in the zombie-people and to do it secretly, I said yes.

Because I was an idiot. Damn me. Damn him. Damn all of it.

I snapped a couple of clean gloves on and directed the paramedics to a secluded wing of Metro General. The rooms weren't quite finished yet, but they had beds and we could take whatever else we needed from the main wards. It seemed the lack of light worked in our favour when I saw how the kids were cringing away from the smallest of glares, eyes tight, some even using their arms to cover their faces.

There were about a dozen of them, all pale and terribly skinny, their bones jutting out from underneath their thin clothing. Long, matted hair made it hard to distinguish the boys from the girls, most kids too young to sport more than a hint of stubble.

I moved quickly from one to the other, giving directions, performing quick exams, shutting out the horror and abuse that the emancipated bodies hinted at. I traced the spidery scars and bumps on their arms, their legs, tales of needles being forced in and ripped out, semi-healed infections and wounds to deep to heal without stitches. I squeezed their clammy fingers in reassurance, careful not to jostle the healed fractures that made their fingers perpetually frozen at odd angles. I listened to their laboured breathing ignoring the crackling of broken ribs. All of their hearts beat too quickly, their bodies riddled with fever, their pupils dilated from whatever drugs were still coursing through their veins.

What the hell was this?

I pushed the panic aside, swallowed the horror and revulsion and let the training kick in. Come on Claire. You know how to do this: Just another day at the hospital.

Blood tests. Blood transfusions. Antibiotics. Fluids. Vitamins. Cold compresses. Stitches.

Heal the bodies now. Deal with the rest later.

I directed the rest of the staff to the more urgent patients and turned to the body nearest to me. It was a girl. I could tell from the hint of breasts on her ribs and the softness of the features on her face, now ruined by skin wound too tight against high cheekbones. Dry red lips blew small puffs of air against the oxygen mask. A matted mop of dark hair was sprawled on the mattress underneath her, the texture impossible to detect through the grime. Her hands were at her sides, filthy graceful fingers twitching occasionally, keeping time with the noise around us.

I checked her hands for broken bones, careful not to press too hard on the green and purple swelling disfiguring her pinky and middle finger. I moved my hands to the rest of her body, bones easy to examine when there was so little skin and muscle left to hide them. Bruising on the rib cage, probably a healing rib. Swelling near the ankle with an open wound oozing blood and puss. That will need cleaning and a couple of stitches. A hairline fracture on the forehead, potential concussion? I placed an ice pack at the base of the skull, trying to relieve the fever and not to think about the organ damage that was sure to greet me once I started investigating.

It wasn't until I shone a bright light straight into her pupil that she sprung alive with a vengeance. She hissed and turned her head away, both her arms leaping to her defence in a move so sudden that even I jumped out of my skin. Heart spluttering I cringed away from a blow I expected to come, only to realise that she was using her arms to shield her eyes, her head shaking louder than words.

"Hey, hey, hey, it's ok, it's ok," I soothed. The girl moved her hands against her ears and continued shaking her head.

"Hey! Hey." I tried, a little louder, attempting to pry a hand away from her ears.

"You are in the hospital. You are safe. Hey!" I tried again, surprised at her strong grip when she continued to press her fevered palm to her ears.

"Hey! You need to calm down. It's ok. Shhh," I let go of her wrist and placed my palm on her chest, feeling her panicked breathing and erratic heart bouncing against my fingers.

Shit, shit, shit. This wasn't helping. I considered sedating her but didn't when I remember the cocktail that was already in her system and how terribly it could react to whatever I gave her.

She was still shaking her head, hands clasped against her ears and eyes clammed shut, her legs twisting on the mattress. Her posture reminded me of another stubborn patient that I knew, in pain, fighting a sensory overload while combatting invisible enemies. There was only one thing for it.

I took her hand from her head, ignoring the resistance, unfurled her fingers and placed her open palm on my face.

"Hey! Feel this? I'm Claire" I said in the most authoritative voice I could muster, hoping to provide an anchor to tether her back to reality, "I'm Claire. I'm a nurse. I'm going to take care of you."

Her head stilled, arm going slack in my grip, fingers trembling on my face. She let her other arm fall back onto the bed, her legs twitching only occasionally. Her breath started to come in longer, deeper gasps.

"That's it. That's good. You are ok. Just breathe" I soothed, keeping her palm pressed against my cheek.

She hissed again, longer, her hand trying to dislodge the oxygen mask. I realised she was trying to speak and lifted it from her face. She coughed and winced. Her lips moved against her breath. Her tongue tried to wet her chapped lips before she tried again. It wasn't more than a rasp, so I moved closer.

"Hey…asss…They...lll…am…us" she whispered. I moved even closer trying to unjumble her words.

"What? Try again." I instructed her when her lips stopped moving.

She moved her hand from my face to grip my gloved fingers, her eyes opening just a crack, dark, tired irises holding me in a fierce stare.

"They will come for us," the girl murmured pleadingly, a warning.

"Who?" I asked, blood freezing in my veins. But she was already gone, eyelids fluttered close, lost in a fevered sleep.

My legs were running before my brain could wrap itself around the fear, ignoring the surprised shouts of 'Claire?' behind me. I burst onto the roof, dizzy from the stairs and stumbled straight into his armour.

"Claire?" he asked, his strong grip steadying me. His mask was off, empty eyes searching, head tilted.

"Matt," was all I could wheeze before the alarms started blaring around us.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still here? Thanks for reading!


	3. Flight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I was flying. Fucking flying. 
> 
> Tried to save zombified kids, watched my friend get stabbed through the heart by, guess what, ninjas, and now I was fucking flying. 
> 
> I had always known daredevil was going to be the end of me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They should make some kind of dictionary for all of Matt's ninja moves. Anyways, here goes nothing!

_Matt_

The sound of the alarms shrieking through the hospital wasn't enough to cover up the noise of dozens of metal grappling hooks slicing through the air around us. The lack of accompanying heartbeats climbing the walls told me all that I needed to know. I grabbed the trembling Claire tighter in my palms, fighting the surge of adrenaline tensing my muscles for the fight, my head tilting this way and that as I tried to filter through the din to figure out the best course of action.

The screaming pulse under my fingertips demanded my attention. My mind cleared: get her safe, first.

"Claire," I said to her warm frame, "go inside. Hide. Now."

I shook her a little before I let her go. I could hear a million questions in her pulse as she hesitated on the spot. The next round of sirens jolted her more than my command. She turned on her heels and sprinted back towards the roof's door, leaving the taste of her fear on my tongue. I had my mask on and was perched on the roof's edge before the door swung closed behind her, billy club clasped tightly in my gloved fingers.

I searched in vain for a heartbeat, a footstep, a huff of exertion, even a sai being unsheathed, anything that could redirect my senses to the enemy that had us surrounded. Metal hooks continued to rain around me, the rest of the attack disappearing in the silence. I considered how long it would take for me to trace the cold taste of metal and somehow untether each grappling hook, wondering if that could possibly give me an edge against this invisible onslaught. Would it save a patient? Would it slow them down? Was I even sure each rope was attached to a ninja? What if they were already inside?

My body tensed between fight and flight, perched on the edge of indecision. Fight them on the roof? Protect the patients? Save the kids?

Shit. What if Claire had gone back to the kids.

I knew the answer before I was even done asking myself that question. I ran flat out towards the roof's door, wrenched it open and tailed her scent down the stairs, cringing against the alarms piercing through my skull.

I followed the familiar trail of antiseptic, rubber gloves, jasmin and fiery spice that I usually associated with warmth and safety, but was now icing my insides with fear. I reached what had been an abandoned corridor only moments ago, and was assailed by the copper taste of blood. I fought the rising panic and extended my senses like Stick had taught me.

_What do you smell?_ Blood, disinfectant, fear, unused guns, adrenaline, tears, sterile packaging, used gauze, soiled bodies and that chemical aroma I couldn't quite place but that I had come to associate with the kidnapped kids. It almost felt…radioactive.

_What do you taste?_ New bedding, dust and dirt disturbed by careful footsteps, cold city air behind me, wintry gusts seeping through partially sealed glass, a window to my left.

_What do you hear?_ Sirens blaring hotly against my eardrums, echoing in my diaphragm. I could make out their automation and the jumbled notes composing their shriek.

Lights, flickering, on, off, each change punctuated with a faint 'click'.

Heartbeats, a dozen beating lighter, faster. The kids.

Three weaker pulses, hovering towards their last moments, mixed to the smell of blood and raw and steel, warm humidity emanating from the gashes.

Another pounding, strong, deep, scared and as familiar as a forgotten nursery rhyme. Claire.

And then the tell-tale heavy silence of a ninjas presence.

The corridor went mute for a beat, friends and foes assessing their next move, their exit, their attack. Then the world on fire lit up like a Christmas tree with the sound of cautious sais being drawn.

There you are.

I moved towards the noise, feeling the satisfying crunch of a nose against my elbow. More blades sliced the air around me as I tasted leather and snapped the wrist flapping on my right, causing a sword to clatter to the ground, the echoes hinting at the ninja's next steps. I continued to move, dodging, kicking, punching at the fighters dotted like stars in my dark. My billy club stopped a stab aimed at my chest and I sent the other flying against the skull of a retreating body. I used the momentum of its return to drive it into the kneecap of the assailant I could smell in my periphery.

The deadly dance upped in momentum, almost perfectly choreographed movements punctuated by crunching and thrashing. I took a blow to my head and my chest, my armour preventing most of the knives from piercing my skin. I used the pain to ground me, fuel my muscles and I charged forward, like Stick had trained me. But for every one of my attacks, a fresh ninja strode onward, making me realise how I wasn't enough, I couldn't be enough.

I punched harder, moved faster, perspiration coating my skin, when I heard the unmistakable sound of young radioactive hearts fleeing the scene, shepherded by soft leather footsteps and feather-light silence.

No! I tried to break through the mass of attacks blocking my way, my intentions too predictable for my invisible enemies, earning me lethal assaults at my armour and bruises blossoming on my back. I stepped back with purpose, feeling an ankle pop out under the heel of my boot, closing my fingers on the terrified pulse of a throat and smacking it into the drywall.

And then the sound of Claire's desperate heartbeat blocking a sai with a metal rod, her figure retreating with every clang. Another mute rhythm breaking through the window behind her, the echoes of the glass shattering painting a picture of attackers surrounding her.

I forced my way through the tide blocking my way to reach her, a new fear fuelling my rage, devil behind each punch, my petrified strength allowing me to lift an assailant and throw him at his friends like a bowling ball, suddenly uncaring about who lived or died.

Claire's sharp intake of breath was loudest as her warmth was thrown out of the window.

I dove.

.

_Claire_

I was flying. Fucking flying.

Tried to save zombified kids, watched my friend get stabbed through the heart by, guess what, ninjas, and now I was fucking flying. Or falling more like.

Cold air slapped my bare arms and pulled my hair against gravity, my scrubs plastered on my skin. I would've considered screaming except that it seemed I had left my lungs on the seventh floor. Instead I let myself slice through the night air, the plunge whooshing in my ears, not bothering to look at the floors speeding by in front of me, my frozen shocked body lulled into horrified obliviousness, wondering idly if I should consider letting my life flash before my eyes, or perhaps start flapping some non-existent wings, or maybe even shift to break the fall, because I was literally seconds away from _dying_.

I had always known daredevil was going to be the end of me.

The impact came from the wrong angle, and it didn't hurt so much. Instead it was warm, and red, and sweaty. I accepted it whole heartedly. If this was death, it was not so bad.

The second impact was more unexpected. It hit me from the side and sounded a lot like swinging into a window with a blind vigilante. This one hurt. A lot. Like falling a few stories and then swinging into a window with a blind vigilante.

I lay stunned on the floor among the broken shards of glass, waiting for my heart to return to my chest. Cold bursts of night air were welcomed into my lungs with a groan. Part of my brain took inventory of my injuries: cuts and bruises that felt like they belonged to someone else. The other part of my brain was busy continuing the fall outside.

Matt stirred before I did, rolling to his side, his suit making the shards of glass tinkle. I felt like I should ask him if he was ok, but I wasn't sure I was. Instead I lay there, eventually shifting to my side, waiting for the flickering lights and the still blaring hospital alarm to help me make sense of this night.

I sat up and looked at my bleeding arms and wondered idly if it would hurt less to be hit by a bus. Except the pain still felt like it belonged to someone else. Maybe to my should've been corpse splattered on the pavement.

Was this what shock felt like?

"Claire." There it was. That 'Claire' that made me willing to be thrown out of windows.

"Claire?" Again. The voice of a devil that made horrible realities and pain be the 'worth it' part of life.

"Claire, are you ok?" This time I considered answering, while I surveyed his shape, seemingly intact but probably sporting double my hurt inside that armour.

I flexed my limbs experimentally, finding nothing worse than throbbing bruising and sharp stings of glass having pierced my skin, the reality of the fact that I was still alive not having quite reached me yet.

"You tell me," I answered with a half-smile that felt more like a grimace, my voice still hoarse from the repressed scream and the fall.

I reached out to graze his stubble with my fingertips as he tilted his head, his x-ray ears listening for 'old ships' in my bones. My fingers tingled with my pulse and he lifted a gloved hand to cover mine, pressing my palm against his face, as if he too needed a moment of reassurance that we were here, we were alive. I let in the first deep breath of the night.

Reality came crashing down on me in one great weight that settled somewhere in my gut and refused to move. The feeling of my nurse friend being pierced by a sword was etched in my palms, the scent of death thinning the air in my lungs. I thought back to those pale, sick kids, feverish and faint one minute, standing like corpses the next, so willing to be rescued by their abusive captors. I remembered all the black clad ninjas that were probably still roaming the wards, taking innocent lives with silent swipes of their swords.

I considered my cuts and bruises for a moment, indecision freezing me as I thought that perhaps I should force Matt to drop the suit and let me take a look at his injuries. But the image of a black army surrounding the devil as he struck like a snake helped me hone in on my priorities.

"We have to go back" I told him, getting unsteadily to my feet. He was up before I was done testing the stability of my legs, and he followed me soundlessly as I led the way back to the horror of the semi-finished ward.

The alarm finally stopped shrieking as we reached the corridor, the silence ringing in my ears, strong neon lights illuminating the corpses of ninjas and security guards strewn and bloody across the floor. I averted my eyes and moved forward. The room where the kids had been was now empty, half-used bags of saline hanging limp, beds abandoned, the only sign of use being bloodied bandages, melted ice-packs and discarded blankets.

Finding no sign of ninjas anywhere, I moved straight to where I knew that the body of my friend was still lying. Blood had pooled around her scrubs, making them redder than the devil's outfit. I clutched her foot, and bent to close the eyes of a woman who had been my friend for all these years, and was now cold sinew and bone. Dead for a reason I could still not explain.

I waited for grief to find me but just felt numb. A gloved gentle pressure found my shoulder and squeezed. I was glad for a touch that could tether me away from this nightmare.

Matt's hold stiffened, clenching my heart. I stood up so quickly I almost knocked into him, wondering if this night would ever end. He remained as still as a statue, head turning this way and that, searching.

"What is it?" I whispered, one of those moments where you are curious but really, you don't want to know. Like asking how someone died when you know the answer will only make it worse.

Matt didn't answer, instead holding a hand up like an orchestra conductor, and then stormed out of the room. I was hot on his heels because I had to know, even though I didn't want to.

He moved down the stairs at a flying pace, stopping a floor below, tilting his head and…sniffing. Then he moved cautiously till we stopped by an abandoned utility cabinet, holding an arm out to stop me when I reached for the door. He tilted his head some more, mouth open, like…he was tasting the air, and then he let the door swing open.

I'm not sure what I expected. Another ninja army, maybe. A dragon. Narnia. Everything was possible these days.

Instead I was welcomed with the image of one of those "zombie" kids, shaking to her very core, one arm on each wall, fighting to open her eyes just a crack. She jumped back when the door opened, crashing against mops and dirty steel buckets but didn't seem to be able to do much more than that. I was impressed she was still conscious given what I knew of her injuries. But then again all her friends had seemed perfectly capable of running away with their ninja buddies, so what did I know.

There was something familiar about those shaking fingers, and I realised this was the girl who had warned me about the ninjas. Even though back then I hadn't fully grasped just how terrified I should have been about the 'they' that were coming for them.

I turned to Matt but the questions I was about to ask evaporated on my tongue when I noticed the look on his face. His mask was still on but his stance said it all. The way he was surveying the girl was the way a child appraises an abandoned puppy, an 'oh please can we keep her' radiating through his frame.

"Matt. No." I said before he could even start.

"Claire… " he said, as if he was trying to reason with me. 'I'll walk it every day you won't even know it's there,' kind of reasoning.

"Matt. No." Because zombies and ninjas and dead friends. Come on Matt.

"Claire." This time firmer. A 'don't be silly, of course not ninjas and zombies, and also I'll walk her every day'.

"No. No, no, no. Absolutely not." Because zombies and ninjas and just no.

"Claire." Gentle. Pleading. A 'look at her, she needs us, you won't even know she is there.'

"Matt, pleeease, please no." Because we both know she will become my problem.

"Claire." This time triumphant, confident. Because he knew this was the only outcome to this crazy conversation.

I wondered if you could sue someone for saying your name.

"Take her to yours," I sighed resignedly. "I'll meet you there once I've sorted this mess here."

He knelt to the floor, took a dusty blanket from the shelf, wrapped it around the trembling girl and took her in his arms. I knew he would fly through rooftops and reach his place without being seen. The girl looked like she was on the verge of collapse, hanging limp in his arms. Matt and his super senses were enough to look after her until I was free.

He turned to leave then stopped, rotating his body to face me.

"Oh and Claire…" he started.

Don't say it, don't say it, don't say it.

I closed my eyes and let the inevitable words crush against my tired heart: "Thank you."

I watched his muscled body disappear down the corridor.

Damn that boy.


	4. Breathe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I fought the questions I was too afraid to ask, focusing instead on the feeling of taut muscles reminding me how to breathe, our skin lit up by spiralling dots of blue and pink. I savoured the peace of each inhale and he let me continue to stain his chest, a breathing statue under my fingers.
> 
> We sat in silence until I finally looked up into the unseeing eyes of the blind man before me and the answer to the question I didn’t want to ask came tumbling out of my fevered mind, encased in blue and crimson.

The deafening brush of scalding parting lips painted the dark crimson. The taste of wine and salty spice drummed with a feverish pulse. _Perfect, tonight has been perfect, don't you think?_ A question like a summer breeze echoing a memory. The woman's exhale melted away with the pressure leaving my wrist.

.

I tried to ground myself to the stifling cold of the bare floor of my cage, but the texture meeting my sagging limbs was all wrong. I stirred away from the slippery softness drowning me, rebelling weakly against the dark weight dragging me down. The quiet welcomed me home.

.

Stinging somewhere around a calf, held together by rubbery fingers. The sharpness of the feeling nudged me in my quiet, a mute poking hinting at more pain to come.

Later, I told the stinging. I'm tired now.

.

Shaking, like an earthquake possessing a body that wasn't quite mine. Bare fingers searched for the epicentre. Bones crumbled to dust, begging the treacherous muscles for a reprieve.

Another darkness met mine, small, tired. _Tomorrow, before school?_ A hopeful pause before a looming red shape. _Tonight Matty._ I let the voice slip away with my consciousness.

.

A confident force at the base of my neck lifted my head. A glass pressed to my lips tipped a sip of cool water into my slack mouth. Latex heat held my mouth closed. I swallowed before I could drown, but the water got lost on its way to my stomach, twisting its way back into my mouth tinged with acid and bile. I retched, stomach heaving angrily, empty, spewing nothing back into the world. Two hands helped me turn to my side, palms screaming with a perfectly accented woman's voice enunciating a name in that earth-shattering, knee-jerking, gut-wrenching way that felt like home: _Matthew_. The name left my mind when the softness that was so wrong enveloped the back of my head.

.

Thirst brought me back to reality, but it didn't belong in my throat. My veins rubbed together like sandpaper, raw and angry, searching for the wrong type of wetness that just wasn't there. Cells screamed in protest, gasping, begging, parched. A clean liquid seeped into my body through the sting in my elbow but it didn't fit, teasing my veins like oil in water, too slippery, too dense, slithering away before my cells could drink it up. Nerve endings lit up in anger as my blood slowly turned into angry grains of sand radiating sluggishly with every beat. Traitor dampness coated my skin, but it felt too hot, echoing the desert inside me.

I searched for the coolness of the bars in the dark, my fingers coming up empty. I let them settle, eventually, on what should have been the familiar hard stone floor, but had instead become smooth linens on a mattress. I began to panic, slowly at first, fighting that feeling of a memory nudging me at the back of my mind while the bitter taste of adrenaline gradually closed my airways. I jerked up when my ears couldn't find the sluggish drip-dripping of draining veins and got lost in the terrified rasp, rasp, rasp of air being sucked into my closed lungs.

I hunted in vain for a memory or an escape, but I couldn't feel my bearings over my screaming nerves, veins pumping emptily and…there was something on my eyes. I wrenched my trembling body away from the softness, aiming for my right, slithering and crawling and slipping until my palms stepped into thin air and my body came crashing down behind them. I felt a sharpness land the wrong way in my elbow, splaying it open like a tunnel of thick wetness. I ignored it and used the throbbing on my crumpled limbs to drive me away, dragging myself with my arms, flailing with my legs, slowing down when my right palm became too slick and slippery, instead using my nails to frantically find purchase.

I felt like I had run a mile when my shoulders found the steadying force of a wall that couldn't have been more than a few inches away, and I pulled myself up until it supported my back, lulling me into a false sense of safety. The ground was hard and that was familiar, but it wasn't hard enough. I yearned for the gaps that were missing on the wall as I sat, panting, my hands still searching blindly for some understanding.

The stinging was still pulling at my arm and I easily brushed it aside: It wasn't as loud as the burn coursing through my veins, and even less loud than the shouting in my head. Foreign thoughts were invading my mind, always slipping out of range before I could still them, unwanted and scrambled, like bad reception. An image for every beat of galloping fire.

_Primal hunger quenched by the rubbery nipple leaking sweetness._

_Stacks of paper with angry, red, 'FINAL NOTICE' warnings inked across envelopes and a hand searching for solutions in the thickness of greying hair._

_A round palm, small fingers clasped tightly across something small and sharp, a tooth, fighting heavy eyelids in search of magic._

_Concerned darkness assessing a flickering shape of fire huddled in a corner of the room, skin too hot, breath too shallow, heart too fast._

The latter moved closer to remove the stinging from my elbow, the touch accompanied by a: " _Get up Matty_ ," an order for a soldier that wasn't me. The command faded away as the shape stepped back and was replaced by another onslaught of pictures.

_A hand sweeping a strand of wet hair away from her eyes._

_A photograph of an old woman, clutched in grief._

_A frustrated sigh counting the pages left to be memorised._

_A growling stomach pondering the contents of a fridge._

Then a desperate thought: _Claire. I need to call Claire._

The name fluttered against the memories that were playing hide and seek. I lunged for them and they hit me like a brick wall, unwavering and unashamed. Forgotten moments floating in a dark oblivion mixed with bright patches of life altering choices.

The strong arms that had dragged me away from captivity.

The nurse that had tried to cover the noise with the feel of her face, flooding me with the image of an old man, bushy white eyebrows diverging against his chocolate skin, wrinkles folding his brows into perfect dunes of familiarity, a deep voice rumbling a soothing 'Claire, Claire, Claire' as he threw the giggling child high into the air only to catch her in his worn palms. "Again," she'd screamed, before the warbling of the woman holding my wrist had sliced through my ears and the word 'hospital' had registered in my mind.

I'd tried to warn her then, but the words couldn't find purchase on my lips and the night had dragged my stinging irises shut.

The next memory was driven by the pure animalistic instinct to return to the only familiarity our bodies could remember. We'd found our legs in the dark, standing stronger than we could lie, hovering on the brink of a battle for a path back to captivity. My eyes had refused to work and yet I'd yanked them open, tears streaming freely as we ran with our protectors, every step bringing us closer to that uncomfortable burn we so craved.

Until the blurry image of a red shape fighting our captors had reminded me of the possibility of an alternative. My legs had wavered as I ran, the sentence 'almost ready' bouncing forth in my mind, prompting our imminent end. I took advantage of the dark shape turning towards the crash reverberating behind us to quietly slip in the door closest to me. My feet had found stairs and I followed them numbly, each step harder, legs shakier, heart refusing to pump properly, as if it knew of the treat that it had been refused.

I'd lost my footing eventually, stumbling, rolling and ultimately crashing into the floor below me. The rest of my memories were glimpses of crawling on my elbows and knees, the impact bruising, guided by the quiet desperation to find somewhere to hide. The red figure standing before me as I lay sprawled in a cupboard was the last thing I saw before I passed out, the feel of night air lulling me through a deep slumber into glassy soft sheets.

The memories tripped from my grasp and danced out of reach. I searched for them, for understanding, but my thirsty veins raged hotter, dragging my mind to a world that wasn't mine. A new voice assaulted me with every beat.

_Dear God, I promise if you make him love me back, I will never ask anything from you again._

Why was everyone screaming.

_Claire? Claire, can I give her anything._

The voices were louder than my palms coating my ears.

_She cheated. She cheated and no matter how much I miss her, I shouldn't text._

This wasn't right, this wasn't possible. I wrenched the binding from my eyes, searching, searching through the blur. Searching for the crowd that was screaming in my head.

_Maybe if I take on another shift this week, I can make enough. Julie canl take the baby for a few hours._

The room was dark, empty save for a lone figure and colourful dots that lit up the floor. But my bare arms glowed brighter, pulsing fluorescent blue. This couldn't be real.

_I don't want to study this crap anymore. This is so unfair. How can they expect us to remember all this!_

My heart raced on, spewing more lava into my system. My veins glowed brighter in response. The voices roared and stumbled into each other.

_I can do this, I can do this. Tomorrow I'll go up and ask for my promotion._

Make it stop, make it stop, please make it stop.

_How am I supposed to know what she wants if she doesn't say it! Always complaining._

My heart became a humming bird and the air stopped working.

_They always say it tastes so yummy, but then I cook it and it's gross._

It had to be the chemicals, it had to be the chemicals. My veins scorched in mute agreement, my lungs heaved empty. My eyesight got confused with the screaming.

_Have I set the coffee machine? I must've. Did I? Shit. I don't remember._

Get them out. Get them out! GET THEM OUT! I clawed and scratched at the fluorescent in my arms, nails digging at the unyielding skin until the chemicals started squirting out.

_Damn it that was a fowl, come on! Why do they bother having refs._

Except the wetness wasn't blue, but dark red, hot and metallic. The shimmering continued in the background, the chemical latching on, happy at home. The lack of air was starting to make the edges of my vision darker. I clawed deeper.

_Ok so I had ice-cream for dinner, but if tomorrow I have nothing but coffee it should even out…right?_

Two hands grabbed my wrists, moving one of my palms to my chest and the other to a sternum hidden behind muscled pectorals.

"Hey, hey! Focus. Focus," a voice commanded, but the noise was lost in the image of a child screaming in the darkness: "I can't see! I can't see! Dad! I can't see!"

_Oh no, crap, is this a rash or the measles?_

Get them out, I wanted to scream back, but there wasn't enough air in the room.

_He looked at me today. I know he did._

"Easy. Focus," more commands shaking my wrists, pushing my palms more strongly against our frames. But all I could feel was the lack of crimson lighting the dark as small fingers traced the outline of a dead father.

_Sleep, sleep, come on. Mummy is tired._

The hands released my wrists and I felt it, then. The heady huff, huff, huff of my lungs gasping for air, ticking faster than a clock, and a broad chest moving like a controlled shore, wave in, wave out, air in, air out.

_Where's my wallet? Fuck. It was right here._

"Focus on my breathing, feel it" the voice flickered in my periphery. My fingers curled onto the cotton to absorb the motion, "come on. Come on. You can do this. Breathe. Like me."

_If you are an actor and you kiss your co-worker, does it count as cheating?_

I tried to find my chest but the air was solid. My heart knocked against my palm, taking flight.

_Eggs, lettuce, milk…what else? There was something else._

His exhale brushed my fingers, long and slow. It felt cold against my skin. He moved even closer, straining my wrist.

_I should put the laundry on._

I tried to mimic the motion, inhaling in three short bursts to match his chest rising. The air folded itself into my lungs, but it still felt empty, like the oxygen had left the room and had been replaced by a blank placeholder.

_She is just jealous cos I'm smarter than her. That bitch._

"Again," he ordered. I hiccupped the air in, straining to hold it before I let it whoosh out. The screaming lost some of its volume.

_Eww cockroach, cockroach, cockroach!_

"Again." I obeyed, this time managing a longer trembling inhale that was almost as long as his. My exhale was a mix between a cough and a gasp.

_I'll text 'hi', just casual hi and nothing else._

The sight of my arms still shimmering blue almost sent me over the edge again. As if he could hear the skip in my pulse, he shifted closer.

"Focus," he thundered.

My eyes were blurry with tears when I closed them. I tried to pull all my focus onto the chest guiding my breathing.

_Come on kid, you can do this._

I could smell him in my next inhale. Our exhales twirled together.

_I guess I could wear that skirt with the blue top, but then the heels don't match._

"That's good. That's good." Each 'good' was louder than my thoughts. I followed his ribs and found my chest matching.

The air chased away the ghosts from my mind and cooled the burn in my veins.

"Again."

My heart slowed with every beat, lava no longer spewed into my system.

"Again."

I continued to copy the breathing under my hands, followed each swish and rustle until my head found silence.

"Again."

I chanced a look down, fearfully peeking through my still throbbing eyes and found my arms pale in the night. Dark blood was still oozing lazily from the scratches, dripping down my elbows and onto my lap. I couldn't feel the pain.

"Again."

I noticed my crimson covered fingers had left stains on the man's t-shirt, most of them concealed by the fabric still scrunched up in my palm. I didn't let go, instead letting my other hand drop from my own chest.

"Ok," he said, "ok."

The words echoed beautifully in the emptiness, but I continued to cling to his chest as if letting go would send me spiralling back into that crowded nightmare of fire and pain and voices that weren't mine.

I fought the questions I was too afraid to ask, focusing instead on the feeling of taut muscles reminding me how to breathe, our skin lit up by spiralling dots of blue and pink. I savoured the peace of each inhale and he let me continue to stain his chest, a breathing statue under my fingers.

We sat in silence until I finally looked up into the unseeing eyes of the blind man before me and the answer to the question I didn't want to ask came tumbling out of my fevered mind, encased in blue and crimson.

I could hear people's thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that wasn't too hard to follow!


	5. The deal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her burning digits clung onto me like a lifeline, and I let her, needing the steadying force to match the auburn reassurance of a girl that was still alive. And still my senses searched for her, checking, checking, afraid to see her crimson light melt into the darkness. Not again.

_Matt_

Claire explained that the girl was probably experiencing withdrawal when I finally managed to reach her on the phone. She said that the girl's body was likely not only addicted but craving whatever chemical concoction they had her on while she had been trapped in that hellhole. She'd calmly warned me about the symptoms to look out for (fever, anxiety, racing heart, tremors, sweating, and even hallucinations) before concluding that there was probably nothing we could give her that would make it better instead of worse. She'd just have to ride it out. Her worry travelled across the phone and settled somewhere near the panicked lump in my gut.

Withdrawal: Just a condition from a medical textbook. Yet it had no place in this room where the girl rocked with suppressed screams as she attempted to claw the pain out of her arms. The saltiness of her fear choked the air in my throat and I wondered if this was what my father had found in the hospital the day the earth had lost its colours. Not his son, but an empty shell spilling inside-out.

He'd saved me then, with his unfamiliar familiar face and calloused hands and a voice that could bring me home, his burgundy light anchoring me to the knowledge that I wasn't alone. But I had nothing to give to this girl, no comfort, no familiarity, no chemical absolution, nothing. I was just a stranger in the dark, standing in an unfamiliar room that shrieked danger while her body ravaged her senses to acquiesce her craving.

I stood in my bedroom and let her heart hammer through my skull and her breath get lost in her chest while she scratched and scratched and scratched until her cuts were deeper than her pain. I swallowed the copper from her radioactive blood cascading to the floor, frozen by the knowledge that the taste of death was about to stain the room.

"Pussy," spat out the Stick in my head, and I realised that it wasn't the familiarity that she needed, but the brutality of a warrior. Because bravery came easy when facing danger, but it was a completely different challenge when dealing with kindness. She needed someone like Stick, someone who could turn the impossibility of what she was feeling into power and the pain into brute strength.

And so I knelt down and forced her slick fingers to feel my chest and her lungs to remember how to breathe. I was firm and commanding and solid. I moved close enough to share her air, so close that I could feel the vibrations of her heart bounce against my chest and the taste of her desperation coated my teeth. And all the while I begged God please, please God, please let me be enough, while my fists shook at my sides because no matter what I did, I couldn't numb the memory of my dead father's face pressed against my fingertips.

Her burning digits clung onto me like a lifeline, and I let her, needing the steadying force to match the auburn reassurance of a girl that was still alive. And still my senses searched for her, checking, checking, afraid to see her crimson light melt into the darkness. Not again.

.

_Claire_

"I quit."

The words were confident and firm and life-altering and surely they belonged to someone who wasn't me. Instead they ran out of my lips and into the room, and just like that, my job, my identity, my purpose, hell, my whole life dissolved in that puff of air that was two little words.

I. Quit.

And they hurt like falling out of a window and landing on shards of glass and feeling a friend die in your arms. They hurt like not being able to save those sick kids and sweeping the death of a nurse under the rug because it was more convenient. They hurt like the injustice of corrupt systems and money ruling the world and for a second, just for a second, I wished that I could follow those words with the wrath of a blind vigilante. Instead I slammed my ID onto the table and walked out of the room. I rode my anger all the way to Matt's place hoping that if I had a purpose, if I could keep busy, then I wouldn't have to face the reality that everything I had ever known about myself and my life had been swallowed into a giant vortex in the space of one night.

I reached Matt's place and let myself in using the 'just in case' key I kept stored with my loose change and found him crouched on the floor of his bedroom, the girl a pool of blood and sweat and tears clinging to his shirt. The bed was unmade, silk sheets unfolded like a hand yearning to reach them. A half empty saline bag lay discarded next to one of Matt's black ties, an empty glass tipped to the side by his alarm, water spilled and forgotten. The room was still dark except for the reflection of that cherry blossom billboard swirling around them, and it made no sense.

The girl's big brown eyes were wide and focused on Matt's face, confusion, fear, resignation and understanding fighting to govern her features. I noticed that their chests were heaving in unison, as if tethered by a string. Silence stretched between them, filling the room, intimate in a way that almost made me look away. I wondered just how many secrets their bodies had spilled tonight.

My arrival crashed into the quiet and broke the spell, but Matt took his time to carefully extricate his t-shirt from her grasp, even though I was sure he must've heard me approach. Yet he never made a move to pry her fingers away, instead gently unfolding his body from the floor and exaggerating the motions of his breathing until the girl let her hand drop into her lap. He stood on the spot, his head cocked, listening, listening, while I remained frozen by the door, an intruder, watching the unfolding of a bond forged from torture and pain.

"Ok," he whispered, like a code or a secret that I wasn't privy to. The girl absorbed the word in a half nod that left her staring at her palms. I rocked on my heels, unsure. My training barked at me to find the source of the blood at their feet, while my instincts kept me stationary by the bedroom door so that I wouldn't startle the wild animal in the corner.

Matt took a half step towards me, finally acknowledging my presence with a curt whiff in my direction, though only moving more freely when the girl maintained her slack posture. I noticed a slight limp as he walked to me, his palm finding my elbow in greeting, his warm fingers trying to convey a story that was too long and gruelling to repeat. The blood encrusted on his hands sent my heart into a worried frenzy that I was sure he could hear.

"We're ok," he said, but I wasn't sure if the 'we' was me and him, him and the girl or the three of us. I absorbed his touch for a long moment, too exhausted to contemplate the repercussions of my body yearning, no, needing the steadying pressure of his fingers on my arm, before I dragged my shattered feet into the room to tackle another one of the infinite obstacles this night had to offer.

.

_Blue_

The woman walked into the room her brow furrowed in a familiar way that I couldn't place. I searched and searched and searched through the steam in my brain until I landed on the face of the old man that I had never met and a name rang clearly in the din: Claire. She looked just like him with her eyebrows crinkled that way.

Except she was beautiful, stunning even, all right angles and big eyes and full lips that belonged in glossy catalogues and sunny places. Not here, not in this dark room where she would die, her beauty lost in the eyes of a blind man. What a waste.

They would come for me, I knew that. The knowledge had found me in the borrowed silence and rang truer than the absence of the screaming in my brain. They would come for me and kill the woman, Claire, and her blind friend and never stop, never stop until they found me, and they had me, and my blood, and the chemicals, and the voices in my head. Because it was all theirs, I was all theirs. And they wanted me back.

And instead of running and screaming and hiding the woman was adjusting the light to shine on my bloodied arms and digging for gauzes, and needles, and antiseptic and glue. And the man, the man was fixing the bed and smoothing the tubes of the saline bag and straightening the glass I didn't realise I had tipped. As if stitches and neatness could save them. As if they weren't coming.

I had to go, I had to warn them, I had to leave but I couldn't find my body. I had arms, I knew I had arms, I'd left them right here, right by my side where I could find them. I promise they were right here a second ago, someone must have moved them.

And legs, I knew there had been legs, legs that could carry me away. And here, look, right here, that scrawny mess of scars and bones and slack muscles on the floor, those could be my legs, please may I borrow them? I swear I just need them for a second, just a second, until I find my arms and maybe my lips because I have to warn them. They need to run, run away from this room and this floor that is all wrong but feels all right and the chest that keeps me calm and I never want to leave.

.

_Matt_

Claire snapped on a pair of gloves and dove into her bag pulling out antiseptic, gauze, needle, thread, steri-strips and glue. She was in her no-nonsense business mode, heart steady, fingers steady, breathing steady, a pillar of calm and efficiency. I placed a bowl of warm water and a clean towel by her side, surveying the wheezing mess at our feet.

The girl now carpeted the floor. The heat of her fever knocked into me in shivering waves, burning, burning, burning like a bushfire. The cuts on her arms made her flesh prickle crimson and pewter. She was pressing one of her arms against the floor, and I wasn't sure if she craved the coolness of the wooden panelling or if she was trying to prop herself up. Her breaths were shallow and fast, hitching every time one of her ribs cackled from the effort. Her heart galloped to fuel the fever and the lingering smell of ammonia and metal seeping from her pores cloyed my sinuses, ringing alarm bells that screamed kidney damage. The smell of captivity still clung to her every move as a fresh wave of panic started to engulf her.

The girl started moving her lips, drowsily. I could hear her breaths become warped as they seeped through, but her words got lost somewhere in her throat and never reached her tongue.

I followed her careering pulse and searched for a source of danger but I found nothing except Claire's startled presence and the familiar smell of antiseptic and latex gloves that reached me in wafts of safety and melted my bones.

The girl's scalding brain continued to fumble with her lips and decided to accompany the movement with a struggle to find her limbs. I could hear her muscles trying to tense in preparation, only to be melted back into the floor by stubborn tremors. An impatient huff seeped through her teeth. Her mending rib shrilled in response.

I took a half step in her direction when she tried to use her bleeding arms to lift herself off the floor, the pressure spewing rivulets of crimson. Her right shoulder was barely in the air and her cheek still stubbornly glued to the panelling when her neck decided that it just couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. She unfolded faster than she had tensed, her ribs hitting the floor with a sloppy smack that spilled the air out of her chest. The impact vibrated against my bare feet as heat rushed to coat her injured ribcage.

Claire was faster than me, placing a steadying gloved hand on her shoulder before the girl could try again: "Hey now, don't you dare, don't you dare even start with all this nonsense. I will not have someone else die on my watch tonight, you hear me?"

"I'll make you a deal, ok? I'll make you a deal," she continued in a tone that reminded me of Sister Maggie and that I automatically associated with waves of terrorised obedience. "You let me fix you up and when you are well enough I promise I will let you run away and do whatever it is that you need to do so badly. Deal?"

The girl answered with two beats, a whiff of adrenaline and a sticky cheek rubbing against the floor in weak nods. Then she used the entirety of the air in her chest to rattle out a stream of 'no's' when Claire's arm moved towards her to prop her up.

Claire waited as the girl tried to pry herself from the floor. Her muscles strained as she searched for purchase from the wall, from the floor, from anything that could help her right gravity. Her fingers found the edge of my nightstand and I heard her nails scrape the wood while her bicep flexed experimentally. She swallowed a great lump of air and heaved in one trembling motion that forced the blood out of her clotting wounds and caused her legs to twitch and then curl in response.

Claire and I witnessed the whole process in incredulous silence because it was unreal that she was even conscious with that level of fever melting her brain. But the girl persevered, adjusting her uncooperative legs until they were stretched out underneath her and prizing her head from the floor with such force that she almost toppled back the other way. She sat, triumphant, with her back to the wall, one hand clutching her rib as she tried to catch her breath, her head yo-yoing in different directions until she managed to wedge it between her unhelpful neck and the corner of the nightstand.

"You two stubborn idiots are going to get along just fine," Claire told me, springing in action.

.

_Blue_

I was trapped, kidnapped, captive of a stolen body that didn't belong to me, stuck between noodle-like extremities that melted in the heat and a half-breath protecting me from the voices that were waiting to invade my brain. Somewhere along the way my cheek had rippled like a puddle and agreed to a deal I couldn't remember. My decision had faded away with my body and I still hadn't warned them.

The wet tugging continued as the woman sutured neat little stitches on the arms that were lying by my side. The slurping noise bothered me more than the stinging because the arms weren't mine. The sound of skin being pulled back together would have made me gag, except I didn't have a stomach. I tried to focus on the quiet, my mind hazy in the heat of a hot summer's day.

A hiss slithered through the quiet, a hiss with each pull, a hiss with each jab. I searched for the snake, but I didn't have eyes. Maybe the arms, the useless bloody arms, were for the snake. I knew that they would make it feel whole. The thought made me happy.

The arms continued to get stitched and I watched the blind man tether between stepping back and moving forward with every hiss, like a rocking chair. The movement stirred the fog in my mind until waves of vertigo crashed into each other, white caps splashing the corners of my skull. He muttered something about pain relief to which the nurse shook her head with sad eyes. I didn't catch the response because I was distracted by someone, somewhere, vomiting. The taste of their dry heaves burned my throat with acid.

The hands that reached for me were bare, and the wiping motion smelled like a big canvas with red paint and a woman's voice describing passion and fire. The hatred that tinged the invasion dissolved when the man walked away with a bile soaked towel. My thoughts stayed black.

Warn them, a voice reminded me. The snake hissed somewhere in the dark.

_._

_Claire_

We'd placed the girl back in the bed, her hospital gown replaced with one of Matt's shirts, the light blue sleeves covering her bandages nicely and the hem flowing till her mid thighs. Matt had mopped up the blood from the floor while I'd reattached the saline to her less mangled arm. She'd looked like she was about to object, but the argument never came, lost in irises that danced behind closed lids. Her lips had quivered slightly with the words she couldn't form. I hoped that her trembling would dissolve into fevered sleep before we tried to treat her any further.

I left the room triumphant and defeated: the girl was still alive. I just wasn't sure I was.

It was almost dawn now, pinkish hues making the flickering of the billboard fainter. I longed for the sun to light this darkness and sweep away the remainder of this awful night. I realised with a pang that for Matt each night stretched on endlessly, the brightness of a tomorrow never burning the shadows away.

Matt was sprawled next to me, his knee so close to my hand that I could feel the heat radiating through the thick fabric of his sweats. The proximity reminded me once again of what could have been and I let those thoughts fill my mind instead of focusing on the night's events.

It was comfortable, even now. Somehow touching Matt had always been the most natural thing in the world. And it had been my choice. Yet, in moments like these, I still wondered.

His ear tilted my way, probably trying to discern the emotions stirring my pulse, so I repeated my question before he could understand too much: "What's the plan, Matt?"

"Sleep!" he answered with a grin that was more of a grimace and instead turned into a yawn. I elbowed him playfully in his side because we both knew that this was not what I meant, or maybe just to disguise my yearning to run my skin against those abs. He let himself slide lower onto the couch and placed his bare feet on the coffee table, wincing slightly.

"Let me have a look at you, come on Matt," I told him, worry pulling me out of the darkness clouding my chest. I half rose from the couch before his arm pressed me back down and against his side.

"I can help," I promised him with my head on his chest. His heartbeat filled my eardrums along with the swish of air swirling in his lungs. I let the noise numb the pain I didn't want to feel.

"You are helping now," he half-rumbled, half-whispered. His breath hitched against my cheek as he bent forward to press his lips gently against my hair, just once, inhaling slowly before he pulled away. His heart did a funny little skip that echoed mine.

"Stubborn ass," I muttered, causing his chest to rumble in a laugh.

I stayed on Matt's chest feeling the quiet rise and fall of sleep taking him away. His face was bent softly against my hair, and I knew that every breath would bring wafts of only me to his oversensitive senses. I fought my heavy lids for a long time, enveloped in the peaceful agony of this forbidden moment. Sleep finally found me with the devil's arm still on my shoulders and my thoughts wondering exactly what I had given up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing in the first person may not always make sense, especially when Blue is half hallucinating from the fever. I hope it's making sense.


	6. Confessions and steam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes Claire could read bodies almost better than I could. I wondered if she was aware of her talent as I considered telling her the truth. If there was anyone who had half an idea of the level of craziness that the past twenty-four hours had reached, it was Claire. Maybe she would understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know when you are trying to tell as story and Matt and Claire keep getting in the way? Well. THIS.

__Matt_ _

I woke with the taste of warm spice on my tongue and my head full of Claire. The sun was trying to burn a hole on my arm, suggesting it was sometime around midday. The noise of the traffic and people milling about a few floors down felt muted compared to the heart beating next to mine. I didn’t move, letting my chest absorb the comfortable weight of a sleeping Claire. Her smell, her breath, her whole presence was intoxicating, pulling me in like gravity. I belonged somewhere in this touch that I wasn’t allowed to crave, my one safety at the end of a storm.

I could hear the girl’s heart beating in the bedroom, the rhythm still feverishly fast. Soft whimpers punctuated her breaths as she dreamed. Her head and arms twitched in unison, protecting her from imaginary threats, leaving trails of ruby in the air.

Her fear was only too familiar. I remembered my first weeks at St. Agnes, when grief and loss took turns to claim the emptiness that was once my chest. But it wasn’t until the night terrors began that I understood the true meaning of pain. Blindness took on a new meaning when my dreams became disrupted by scuttling insects chewing up my eyes. I could feel their little legs spidering as they bit into my flesh, each mouthful burning like acid and fire. I’d scream and I’d tear at my eyes, trying to rub them off. But the creatures continued unperturbed, taking their time to eat up the last bit of blue from the sky until my world turned black. I’d wake to find out that the nightmare was real, that my eyes were open, but the world had curved into flames, and I’d yell for my dad, because I couldn’t see, I couldn’t see.

Sister Maggie would come at first, her quiet footsteps bronze and honey in the dark until her body would blaze into the room. I’d wait with bated breath for her weight to make the mattress creak beside me, righting gravity like a compass pointing north. She’d swallow my reaching hands into her grasp and place a worn palm by the side of my head. She’d brush her fingers through my hair with rhythmic strokes that I’d swallow greedily until they drained the emptiness from my chest.

“Matthew,” she’d croon through sultry breaths the shade of butterscotch. I’d follow the softness back into a dreamless sleep, her presence blinding like a moon in a starry sky. Occasionally, I’d wake up and lift an arm to make sure that she was still there. And she always was.

Then one night I’d toppled back into wakefulness with my teeth chattering and a sharp keening stuck in my chest, sweaty palms searching for my dad’s face as blackness pressed against my eyes. I’d screamed and sobbed in terror and grief, blankets knotting against my thrashing legs, searching for the footsteps that would bring me to safety. But Sister Maggie never came.

I don’t remember how long I waited, how long I cried and begged. But that night the hole in my chest filled with something cold and hard, solid and permanent. I rode her absence back into the same nightmare, greeting me over and over and over, but I never screamed again. I clenched my teeth and stilled my body and waited for the dawn that I would never see.

In the bedroom the girl trashed weakly, rustling the silk sheets. Her whimpers turned into intelligible mumblings and pitiful moans that reminded me of small animals searching for safety. Her head turned this way and that, feeble movements the shade of auburn that sent her skull crushing into the pillow. I waited, watching her shape change colour with her pulse.

More mumblings, this time louder, feverish alabaster breaths staining the blackness. She took in a deep lungful of air and her ribs locked. Her arm jerked in the void.

“Matthew,” she whispered, rose and cherry.

I froze.

_._

__Blue_ _

The voices found me in my dreams, low and buzzing in the background. I continued searching for the key that would unlock my cage with quick swiping motions that covered the floor. The tubes connected to my arms hindered my movements and stung when I pulled harder, but I had to find the key. They were coming.

The buzzing grew in volume, making it hard to concentrate on my fingers as they fumbled against the ground. I looked down and saw my arms glow, fluorescent blue veins burning me from the inside. I forgot how to breathe.

I tried to swallow the panic and continued to search the floor, my heart pounding loudly in my ears. The buzzing persisted as a crowd chattered happily in my head. I knew that even a yell wouldn’t be loud enough to pierce through their voices. But maybe if I could isolate just one, maybe they could help me?

Little paper sachets started raining around me, their weight filling the quiet, covering the dusty ground of my cell. I grabbed one and traced the familiar squiggle that I knew was engraved on the surface. The sachet shuddered and sprouted insect-like spindly legs that carried it up my arm. I jumped and slapped it off but now all the other sachets were coming to life, swarming my arms, my legs, my back, my stomach. I tried to stand but my legs were too weak, and my arms were already pinned to my sides with the weight of the monsters burying me. My next scream was muffled by the critters coating the insides of my throat, choking the air with their legs, making me gag, their allies finding my eyes and feasting on their flesh with sharp tearing motions. The darkness around me turned into a crawling blue sky chewed away in greedy chunks.

I woke in the memory of a small boy shouting in the dark.

“Dad! Dad! I can’t see, I can’t see, I can’t see!”

A fear that wasn’t mine fought against the darkness with eyes that wouldn’t work. His panic was infectious, sending my pulse spiralling as I struggled to find my own eyes. I wanted to soothe the boy, but my body ended where his began, merging us in a loop of terror.

I waited as careful footsteps found him in the dark. A familiar hand grasped his grief while a palm stroked his panic away. She smelled like soap and heavy fabric and incense, and the scent brought the boy a sense of mollified calm, a degree of acceptance to the horror that scarred his world.

“Matthew,” she murmured like a lullaby. The boy liquefied and tensed at the same time, fighting to acknowledge a weakness that he didn’t want to have.

I let the name swirl on my tongue, tasting each cadence like tannins in a complex wine. The syllables were carefully placed on my lips when my eyelids finally fluttered open.

_._

__Claire_ _

I woke to the feel of a hand gently stroking a strand of hair away from my face. The touch was soft but unexpected and I jumped back to a sitting position, disoriented, my neck stiff from sleeping at such an awkward angle. My face stung with the smack of cold air after hours cradled on a warm chest. I groaned, stretching my neck, one eye squinting while the other tried to go back to sleep.

Matt was already standing, tousled-haired and wide-eyed and…distracted. He squeezed my shoulder gently and headed to the bedroom without a backward glance. Well…a backward sniff? Whatever it is that blind people should do when they are trying to be considerate after they wake a person up by giving them a heart attack.

“Good morning to you too,” I muttered, trying to shake the stiffness and sleep from my body. I headed to the bathroom dreaming of the coffee and the bacon and eggs that I wouldn’t mind devouring right now but knowing that I was unlikely going to be treated to a cooked breakfast this time around. I hadn’t just survived Russian torture after all. Only ninjas, half-zombies, flying out of a window, losing a friend and quitting my job. Oh, and spent half the night suturing leftover zombie kid’s arms. But sure, why would that deserve special treatment.

I considered splashing some water on my face and heading to the only patient I had left (well, one and a half if you considered the potential of me finally treating Matt’s injuries), but one look at my face told me that only a shower would do. I shrugged off yesterday’s clothes, careful not to re-open the cuts criss-crossed on my arms, and gingerly stepped into the shower, sighing as the steaming spray unknotted the muscles on my back.

The water turned pink as it washed away the gore from the previous night and I tried to let it take away the grit of memories and emotions simmering under my skin. Revulsion, exhaustion, anger, grief and confusion whirled just out of reach, diluting each other before one could take over. I groaned in frustration.

I’d really done it this time. I’d gone and thrown my career in the trash. I mean, people had died. Actually _died._ And all this because I had taken a beaten-up vigilante out of a dumpster.

Damn it Matt, damn you and all that you make me do. And all that you make me want to do.

For a second I let all my anger and frustration at Matt boil to the surface. I thought about taking it out on him, about thrashing this bathroom, about leaving this house and never looking back. But the sentiments evaporated faster than the steam because I couldn’t lie to myself. Could I really ever blame Matt for helping me save a life, for forcing me to do the right thing, over and over again?

He was right, and he had been all along: I had made my choice the moment I’d set my eyes on him.

__.__

__Blue_ _

At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I was too afraid to plunge back into the sightless nightmare to close my eyes. I squinted to dull the pain and shielded my stinging irises with a heavily bandaged arm. The movement smarted and pulled, and it took me a while to remember why. A shirt cuff slid down to my elbow unable to withstand the tug of gravity. It smelled like the chest that had found me in the night.

My head throbbed, dizziness pinning me to the pillow, faint nausea informing me that somewhere there was a stomach that was not happy. A babble of conversation continued in the forefront of my mind, making the brightness sharper and the headache pound. My pulse fuelled it, circulating waves of fire and a craving that I just couldn’t place. I didn’t dare to look down and check if my veins were still shimmering blue. I hoped that the fluorescence had all been part of some terrifying hallucination from the night before.

It took me a while to notice the man standing by the door and even longer to understand whether one of the voices clouding my head belonged to him. I crushed my cheek into the pillow so that I could face him and squinted harder through the stabbing. His hair was ruffled from sleep, and he wore a t-shirt that bore a bloody handprint like a relic from a horror movie. My hand, my blood, I realised with a shock.

The rays from the sun made it seem like he was shimmering, glowing, a white halo surrounding the edges of his shape. My eyes absorbed his contours along with the soreness and the wonder of seeing daylight for what felt like the first time. I’d forgotten that the world was made of colours. I’d forgotten how much seeing them could hurt. Somewhere inside me were glittering memories of a life that was not in black and white. The colours of the present belonged with that girl, too bright and cheerful for the shadows that governed my new truths.

I concentrated harder so that I could focus on his face through the crack in my eyelids. No. He wasn’t speaking. He was listening, his brow furrowed, his head tilted my way. His lips were set in a hard line, refusing to ask the questions that were simmering in his brow. His eyes were steady and unfocused, stirring in my direction but always missing my shape by inches. I continued to study his face in silence, wondering if he could sense my stare, unsure if I wanted him to.

Just then one of the invisible voices whooped in triumph and sprang from the babble with an ‘I did it! I did it!’ that made me wince. The fire raged hotter in response and I bit my lip to hold in a whine. The man by the door tensed, listening harder, and then…he sniffed the air. I sucked in a deep breath and waited for the voices to recede to the deafening background noise so that I would have the space required to be baffled.

The blind man finally took a step forward and my body tensed automatically. I only noticed I’d stopped breathing when my heart spewed lava in anger, the voices pulling my attention this way and that. I tried to keep my head still and not turn my ears to listen harder. They weren’t trying to talk to me after all. But the man was.

His lips moved with a question I couldn’t hear over the excited chatter that already filled my ears. He stopped, unsure, when I didn’t respond. I shook my head on the pillow, trying to clear it. I closed my eyes, focusing on forcing some air into my chest. One of my ribs reminded me that it wasn’t happy, throbbing sharply in response. The man moved closer and raised his palms when I pressed my bandaged arms hard against the mattress, focusing only on the loudness of the sting until the rest quieted enough for me to ignore it.

“Do you know me?” he repeated.

His voice was soft, like this pillow and this bed and everything about this place. It was comforting and unfamiliar at the same time, like relief stifled by overwhelming brightness after too long in the dark. But his question made no sense, and I concentrated harder on his features as I pondered it, my brain churning thickly, looking for some familiarity. I found none.

“Matt?” a woman called from another room. The man hesitated, then turned and headed towards the door, grabbing a clean t-shirt on the way. I noticed that he moved with deliberate sure movements but his fingers stroked everything in his path as he walked, the walls, the doorframe, the wardrobe. I wasn’t sure if he needed the reassurance that they were still there, or if he needed to understand where he belonged in an invisible world.

The name, Matt, rang with unexpected familiarity. It flitted through the alien chatter in my head, trying to dart through the gaps and piece itself into a memory.

Matt. Matty. _Matthew_.

A world made of shadows and flames, terror and violence and pain, so much pain, pain from the anger, pain from the void that replaced love. The blind boy was now a man.

Matthew. I grasped his stolen memories in the palms of my hands and said nothing.

__._ _

__Matt_ _

“Do you know me?” I repeated, advancing towards the huddled shape with deliberately slow footsteps. I couldn’t bring my voice to be louder than a whisper, my throat constricted by the strange sensation that I was demanding stolen secrets.

She’d said my name, I heard it, I knew it. Matthew. She’d said it. And I knew that there were a million rational explanations as to why she would know my name. Yet all my senses tingled with the knowledge that this was something more. She knew me. And I had to know how.

In the bathroom, Claire turned the shower off. The borrowed heat from the droplets lit her shape in hues of apple and ginger, glorious forbidden curves hinting at what could have been. She leaned on the sink, one hand on each side, searching for steadiness as her heart pumped a little too quickly. The steam seeping through the cracks in the door brought rivulets of her familiar smell to my nostrils and for a moment I was right there in the kitchen again, tasting her lips. 

My touch had woken Claire up with a jolt and I had quickly retreated to the bedroom, ignoring my chest as it contracted from the sudden bite of cold. Except this cold belonged inside, somewhere near my lungs, instead of on my skin.

I listened to Claire pick up her top in the other room, cotton rustling as she considered it, the smell of her skin mixed with sweat and at least three different types of blood emanating from the fibres of the fabric. I knew what she wanted before she even called for me. I headed for the wardrobe and pulled out a clean t-shirt at random, unsure about the colour or print.

One of the disadvantages of shopping with Foggy was that you never really knew what you ended up with. My wardrobe could have been all pinks and purples for all I could see. The thought almost made me smile but then I remembered about me and Foggy and Karen and Nelson and Murdock. My old life. The thought of smiling slid off my face as if wiped off by shards of glass. I didn’t want to think about any of it. I knocked on the bathroom door, my knuckles strained as I fought not to use the fist for something else.

Claire opened the door dressed only in a towel, saturating the air with the smell of soap and hot water. She had washed her hair with my shampoo, but I could still taste cinnamon in the steam. The familiar smell of antiseptic and latex gloves lingered under her fingertips, reaching me in magnetic waves. The droplets still glistening on her skin rang with the copper and calcium from my pipes. I could sense her nakedness in her smell and the towel did nothing for me but send more concentrated wafts of her as it swirled around her legs.

She took the t-shirt along with my hand, straining knuckles and all, and sat me down on the edge of the tub before I could think of objecting.

“Strip,” she ordered. I cocked my ear and measured her pulse, tasting her temperature and finding nothing more than the scarlet and copper of down-to-business Claire. I lifted my shirt, surprised to find myself a little disappointed, and let it fall to the ground at my feet. Her temperature rose infinitesimally, marigold and honey, when she turned my way, her face lighting ruby red. She hid it by busying herself with her clothes.

She was in control when she finally turned to me, placing two hands on either side of my face and beginning a thorough examination with long strokes of her hands. She felt the skin under my hair, around my ears, from my forehead and down to my neck. She didn’t linger too long on the tender skin above my ear, her head shaking in exasperation. We both knew that there was a mild concussion there. And we both knew that there was nothing that could be done about it.

Her hands were calm and confident and felt better than a warm summer breeze. Each touch dragged all of my senses into the perfect feel of her hands against my skin, each stroke releasing a mesmerizing melody, the pressure just strong enough to make each of my nerves spark and yearn for more. I had to focus to stay in the room and not moan with pleasure.

Her fingers were light as a feather on the bruising that heated my ribs but I still had to inhale slowly not to wince. Her breath fanned my face as she examined my front, and I could taste her hunger and my toothpaste coating her teeth. She moved to my shoulders, taking her time to examine the swelling that reached my right shoulder blade where I had pulled the muscle trying to break our fall from the window. The excess fluid strained against my skin, lapping uncomfortably on the torn fibres of my muscles. I guessed it was accompanied by bruising based on the concerned hisses that Claire was making.

My eyes slammed shut in surrender when she moved to my back. She carefully prodded a gash that was still bleeding near my spine, and then continued down, her fingers tracing each one of my vertebrae and following the denture of each muscle, painting a slow-burning picture of knee-jerkingingly addictive fire. Too soon, she reached the edges of my sweats and stopped.

“How’s your legs, Matt?”

I didn’t want her to stop. I considered taking her wrist and pulling her close. I wanted to bury myself in the smell of her skin and never come out.

_Women and silk sheets are luxuries men like you can’t afford_ , warned the Stick in my head, _let her go, Matty_.

_I know_ , I growled back, _I did_. And it had been her choice, and as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing about her decision had changed. It was for the best, I knew that. I just wished…sometimes I just wished.

“Matt?” her hand was back on my shoulder. I had to work not to lean into her touch.

“Just a light sprain on my right ankle,” I told her. Her head sliced the air as she shook it.

“So, what’s the verdict?” I asked her before she could start the lecture that was waiting for me in between each of her breaths.

“You’ll live,” she told me with a maddened sigh, “your back needs a few stitches and knowing you, a few of those ribs are definitely busted. We’ll need to ice the ankle, and the shoulder, and the head.”

I nodded and listened to her heart. It continued to beat infuriatingly evenly as she searched her bag of supplies, preparing needle and thread. She had learned by now not to try and numb me.

The needle entered my skin with a screeching wet sound that told me exactly how many layers of skin and muscle it was piercing. I heard the drop of blood that oozed out and trickled down my back. Claire caught it with some gauze that bristled my skin like sandpaper. The gentle rubbing stung more than the needle. I distracted myself from the pain by focusing on Claire’s steady breathing.

“How’s our patient?” Claire asked, because she always knew when talking would help.

I let my senses roam back to the bedroom, searching for the shape of white heat that hovered on the bed, her distinctive radioactive taste flaring and receding with her erratic pulse.

“Awake,” I told Claire, wondering just how aware the girl really was as her head tilted in response to sounds that weren’t there.

“That’s something,” said Claire. Really, it was everything that the girl was even alive at this stage.

I stayed quiet, remembering the exact way the girl’s lips had vibrated as she’d murmured ‘Matthew’.

“What is it? Did she say something?”

Sometimes Claire could read bodies almost better than I could. I wondered if she was aware of her talent as I considered telling her the truth. If there was anyone who had half an idea of the level of craziness that the past twenty-four hours had reached, it was Claire. Maybe she would understand.

“She said…” I hesitated, “she said my name. She said Matthew.”

I let my tone carry the world of implications that were burning my mind. Claire stayed silent for a long time, tying off two sutures with a squelching tug before she spoke.

“I’ve said your name many times last night. It probably stuck…I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew my name too, Matt.”

Her gentle tone felt like chiding and suddenly I didn’t want to talk about this anymore.

I changed the subject, noting for the first time that her bag of supplies was unusually full, fibres straining to contain the vials and fabric and metal and liquid, all stained with a strong smell of hospital.

“What’s up with the extra supplies?”

It was a comment and a question, but I was still surprised when her heart changed rhythm, scared, excited, sad, tired. I waited, trying to understand her body’s response.

“Well,” she finally said, clipping off another stitch with a white hot sting, “I guess you could call it a severance check.”

“You lost your job?” I was appalled, cold shock numbing the tips of my fingers. How had I missed this?

“Quit,” she clarified, “It was for the best. Really. I’ll be ok,” her heart told me another story.

“Claire, why didn’t you tell me? What happened? Was it…?”

Was it my fault. But I couldn’t say it. Because of course it was. The weight of another mistake settled itself on my shoulders and bruised me with guilt.

I turned and reached for her hand. Her gloved fingers were slippery with my blood. I squeezed them.

“I’m sorry, Claire”

“Yeah. Me too,” and she was, sorrier than she had ever been. Lost and scared and tired.

My fault. Again.

I didnt’t move. There were so many things I wanted to say, apologies mixed with advice, words of reassurance and threats. None of them could fix things. The sour taste of failure replaced my words.

“Hey, at least I have access to the best lawyers in town if I decide to sue,” her tone was lighter, and she let go of my hand to bandage the sutured cut.

I didn’t say anything, the air abruptly so thick that I couldn’t get it through my throat. I swallowed loudly to get it unstuck.

“Matt?” she turned to search my face, her pulse confused.

“Nelson and Murdock didn’t work out,” I said it in a rush, a scalding rip of a band-aid so that maybe admitting it out loud would hurt less.

“Matt...”

Here it comes, I thought, the lecture. The importance of friendship, of being human, of having a life outside of the devil. I knew it all already.

“This city needs me Claire,” I told her before she could start, “You’ve seen last night just how many horrors are tearing it apart. I can’t stop now.”

“Your body needs you Matt. Look at you! You are burning the candle at both ends, how long do you think it will be before you fizzle out?”

Her anger rose and spilled from her mouth crimson and magenta.

“I’m fine Claire.”

“No, you are not fine. You need your job. You need your friends. And they need you! You need some normal in your life. Some human! This” her hands swiped the air as she gestured to my bruised body, “this cannot be all that you are. You are distancing yourself from the one thing that you are trying to protect!”

She didn’t understand. None of them did. None of them knew what it was like to lie in bed and hear people screaming in pain. They didn’t know what it felt like to be woken up by women pleading for help and children sobbing. They didn’t know that I could feel the damage ripping through bodies with every punch, every bullet. Or what it felt like to hear the sirens reach the innocent and know that they would be too late, that they were always too late. They didn’t know what it was to fail a life and know, deep down, that you could’ve saved them. Every hurt, every loss, every scream, belonged to me. This was my city, and I was the only one who could save it.

I didn’t say anything, and instead stood up from the edge of the tub. The sutures pulled against my skin, inflammation slowly pooling fluids around each stitch. I could feel Claire’s stare boring into me and for the first time since I’d met her, I wished that I had my tinted glasses on.

I turned away, opening the medicine cabinet and pretending to search for something, anything, suddenly needing my whole body to do it. Her hand moved towards me, stopping to cup the side of my face, forcing me to face her. I didn’t know if I wanted her to pull away or for her to never let go. Her heart pounded in a worried rhythm that annoyed me. I wished she didn’t waste the worry on me.

“I’ve told you before, St. Matthew. Martyrs only end up one way: bleeding and alone,” she almost crooned it, my ears lapping up the words like caresses. Their meaning iced my guts and heated my heart all at once. Her worry hurt as much as her rejection.

“You have a choice, Matt.”

I didn’t. This was the only choice.

_Come on Matty, there’s work to do_ , encouraged my father.

I turned my feelings into steel and felt Matt Murdock disappear.


	7. The devil that set me free

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My friend was hurting and when he wasn’t running around disguised in horns and self-righteousness, he was the man that I had to actively stop myself from falling in love with.

__Claire_ _

He was gone, slid right through my fingers, a curtain fall in his unseeing eyes, and I found myself holding the devil in my palm. I recoiled like I’d been slapped. He turned and went back to searching the medicine cabinet, the coldness of his frosty dismissal almost making me shiver.

Stupid, stubborn, son-of-a-bitch. Fine! You know what? FINE.

I stomped my way into the kitchen and yanked the door of the freezer open. I picked up all the icepacks I could carry and closed the freezer with a little too much force. He was still shuffling with the labels when I got back to the bathroom, doing his best impersonation of a blind man. I didn’t care enough to help him find the aspirin. I slammed four icepacks in the sink below him, experiencing a savage pleasure when he winced slightly at the noise, and left the room wondering how much it would have hurt if I’d thrown them at his head instead. Not enough.

FINE! If he wanted to go kill himself by fighting ninja armies, that wasn’t my problem. Ha! See if I care! I hoped that he would die of lack of sleep or freeze to death from the icepacks I just brought him. Stupid. Stubborn. Now all I needed to do was to make that sure that his little project was still alive and then I could leave this house and leave this city and leave this man behind.

I headed back to the fridge to search for more icepacks for the girl but found myself fuming at the well-stocked freezer instead, my hands shaking into balled into fists. I couldn’t go into the bedroom like this.

I closed the door and let my forehead rest against the cool metallic pane, taking deep calming breaths. In through the nose. Count to five. Out through the mouth.

Come on, Claire. Why do you even care so much?

Why does he always have to be so Goddamn stubborn?

My exhale came out as more of a growl. I didn’t recognise myself in all this anger, all this violence, this rage. Matt made me experience actual primal rage. I’d always been loud and stubborn and feisty and bossy, I knew that. But this was the next level, as if the devil in Matt had access to a secret door inside me where all emotions were x to the power of six. There was no baseline, there was no limit, Matt reached in and wrenched out my feelings raw. With him I was wild, unpredictable, unfiltered, exposed. With Matt, I was free. And screw him for having this much power over me.

I shut my eyes and willed my heart to beat less angrily. My skin felt too tight, struggling to contain this new version of Claire. I forced my fingers to straighten, focusing on the movement alone, one finger at the time, one hand before the other. By the time I reached my pinkies, my hands were steady by my sides, my breathing slow and even. I’d pushed the anger down to heat my organs, simmering occasionally in my pulse, keeping me warm, giving me strength. I could be out of this house soon. Then I never had to see him again. Stupid, stubborn.

I opened the fridge again and grabbed some more icepacks. I placed them on the counter while I ransacked his kitchen cabinets to search of some tea towels. I knew that if I asked him I would find them twice as fast. But he was still in the bathroom and I was perfectly happy to get on with my life without him. I grabbed a bunch when I eventually found them, taking care to slam the cabinet door shut as loudly as I could before straightening up and carrying everything to the bedroom.

The sight of the girl sucked my feelings into a void. I forgot my anger faster than I remembered how to breathe, the unforgiving daylight shining from the windows painting the details of just how much I had missed during the night.

She was a corpse. A living corpse, encased in matted greying skin, breathing through chapped blue lips, tremors rocking the stringy meat that was left of her muscles, too weak to live, too scared to die. She was awake, as Matt had said, squinting at the world through lifeless eyes, her head jerking this way and that to try and follow the conversation of a crowded room. Except there was no one there.

I stood at the door, appalled, horrified, and furious at whoever had done this, wanting to help but unable to take a step closer, the icepacks pressed against my chest warming me from the cold that filled my lungs. Matt appeared by my side, watching the girl through my pulse, and I forgave him for choosing violence over friendship. I wanted to join him in punishing whoever could do this to another human being.

He took the icepacks out of my arms and I let them hang limp by my side, watching him as he carefully wrapped each one in a tea towel and placed it by the girls neck, near her wrists, by her ankles, around her middle. I just stood there, a new ornament replacing the door.

“Claire?” he coaxed me gently, and I remembered who I was.

“She’ll need more fluids. I can’t give her anything for the fever, so we’ll have to use the icepacks…” I bit my lip, uncertain. This was more than I was qualified for. I needed a hospital, tests, equipment, machines, a freaking doctor, a psychologist…shit, anyone, anything to help. I needed help.

Matt didn’t need telling twice, taking less than 10 seconds to disappear and bring back my bag full of supplies and placing them at the side of the bed.

“I need a second” I needed to think. Think Claire, think damn it. “You go sit and ice that ankle.”

He looked like he wanted to object but instead did as he was told, probably for the first time in his stupid, stubborn life. I heard him slump onto the couch and place his legs on the coffee table, shifting to adjust the ice pack around his ankle.

Had he just listened to me? How did I do that? I needed to remember how to do that.

I stared at the girl trying to figure out what to do first, what to do at all, using the space in the room to clear a space in my head. The girl’s face crashed in my direction, more like an uneven rock rolling on the pillow than a head tethered by a neck. Her empty gaze flitted my way and locked on my face, but I found no expression in her vacant eyes other than an instinct to follow the movement in the room.

Damn, this was some serious freaky shit and I almost wished that I hadn’t told daredevil to leave.

I took a breath and exhaled all the Claire out. This was just another problem, another patient. I moved by the bed and gently prised her shirt open, deciding to examine her with bare hands because the medic in me needed to feel everything that a machine couldn’t, but mostly because the human in me needed to remember that this was another person, another human, not some freakish mutant alien science experiment. I needed to know that someone was still in there, someone worth saving.

The light in the room made her skin glow like a rainbow, shining purple and green and blue on her ribcage, on her hands, near her back, the broken bones jutting out as a dare, don’t you touch us, when even the swelling was trying to stay away, a drained body unable to produce a decent injury. A faint sheen of sweat diluted the dirt where her skin was unbruised, but even that was half-hearted, whatever fluids were left busy spiralling the fever out of control.

I took her temperature, vaguely aware of how Matt flinched when the thermometer beeped its measurement. I moved to listen to her breathing, placing my free hand delicately and carefully on her good ribs then moving to take her pulse.

Whimpers ripped out of her throat at my touch, stuttered consonants that lasted the length of each breath. Her body arched, pulled by an electric current that forced her core towards the heavens and locked her in a semi-crumpled airborne state. Her gaze faded, glassy-eyed, staring, seeing, watching another room, another world.

I lifted my hands and she cascaded back to the present in a heap, writhing in pain as she begged in stammered whispers that hammered against her breath: “Stop, stop, stop, please, please, stop.”

I kept my hands raised by my head and used my eyes to search, to look, to source her pain. Seconds ticked by in slow motion and I started to pick-up futile unimportant details, as a mind does when it derails. Things like how her tongue punctured the ‘t’s with a little too much tempo, exposing a hint of a foreign accent that revealed the existence of a previous life. Or how the mop of messy dark hair tangled like a bird’s nest on the pillow hid its texture but shimmered with reddish-brown hues in the sunlight. Each stupid, silly detail filled the room with the overwhelming reminder that this was a person, an actual real person, with a life, and a family, and a job, and hopes and dreams and interests. And she was going to die.

“Claire…” Matt whimpered from the couch, pleading and warning, his ear turned to listen to the heart that was trying to take flight.

“Matt.” I almost shouted back, _I know_. But I had barely touched her, I hadn’t pressed on the bruises and the breaks. I didn’t know where her pain was coming from. I didn’t know how to make it stop.

“Stop, please,” the girl begged, air unpeeling from her lungs like a hurricane and breeze, and the three of us started playing a game of tag with our panic.

“I’m stopping. I’m stopping ok? See?” I waved my raised palms, white flags of surrender reflected in the brown desolation of her eyes, “But you need to help me, ok? You need to talk to me and tell me what hurts.”

Somebody tell me what to do.

Matt was once again hovering by the bedroom door, an icepack gripped like a sword in his palm, my very own x-ray and MRI machine waiting to be called. I prayed that his fingers could read the braille that hid the answers under her skin, but the girl didn’t even let him try.

“No, wait. Wait. Please,” she slapped her head on the pillow, swatting away the thoughts that were in the way, “You have to go. You have to go. You have to go. Please.”

Her voice hammered through each connotation, pausing to stifle a scream as she writhed and burned at the stake, eyeballs rolling freely like pebbles on the shore. My brain reeled with the feeling of dejavu and I saw Matt reach for me as my whole body shut down.

I said it at the same time as she did, a well-rehearsed hopscotch rhyme: “They are coming.”

“Why?” asked Matt.

The devil didn’t waste time with fear, fear was his calling, his invitation to war. He wielded the fear until it shaped itself into a punch, the ding at the start of a fight, the expected prelude before he stepped into the ring, into his birth right. He followed his calling blindly but with the ferocity of a man who could see more than the world.

I gripped his wrist until there was nothing left but the devil in the room and my heart picked up the fight.

“Why,” he asked again, and there was no Matt in his voice.

The girl drew out of her carcass, an imperfect soldier called to arms. The stake burned on and her body with it, but damn it if they would have her mind too.

“They need…” she struggled, her voice full of nails, “us. All of us.”

Us. Her and the other kids. The others that had run straight into hell and were probably dead by now. 

“Why,” Matt asked again, a stubborn five-year-old wanting to find out just how many answers the world held. This was where they ended, in the weak shrug of a girl that was too busy thrashing to lift her shoulders.

“They’ll. Come. For. Me,” A violent tremor broke each word better than a full stop. I turned to check the window, half-expecting to see a ninja waiting outside, its black cladded body clouding the sunlight as a symbol of the devastation to come.

“I will keep you safe.”

Matt said it like he’d said it a million times to a million people, his very own war chant as he bid good evening to his city. He said it as a promise and a triple dare, but my bones ground with the blows from the times daredevil had failed.

The girl considered him for a long moment, carefully weighing the attributes of the only weapon she would be allowed in this fight. Her eyes darted between his arms and his face and I knew what I would be feeling in her position.

“But you are…” she faltered, a remnant of politeness choking her words more than her grinding, useless lungs.

“Blind?” Matt suggested helpfully. He said it like he was talking about the weather instead of admitting to a disability. But then Matt had taught me just how much sight could be a distraction when it came to watching the world burn.

“Not as blind as the rest of us,” I muttered. Matt looked like he would’ve grinned if the devil hadn’t stolen his face.

The girl tried to shake her head but shook her body instead.

“They’ll come,” she sighed, hoping that we would understand, hoping that we would run. But I saw the fear in her eyes, begging us to stay. She was already dying on this bed, and if she was saved then she would be captured and drained with clean swipes of a ninja’s sword. There was a bleak end waiting for her at each fork in the road, her forever-after a choice between deaths. But nobody liked to die alone. Even if it meant putting your faith in a blind stranger and his friend.

“And we’ll be ready,” I bound our fates together in a sentence and threw away the key.

__

.

__Blue_ _

How do you explain death to a stranger? How do you sum-up your life in one sentence? How do you convince someone who doesn’t know you that they need to let you go?

Death was coming for me, I knew that. I could feel it waiting in between each beat. I could hear it in the silence outside. It was coating the katanas of my enemies. It was pulsing underneath the burn.

But death was patient, it knew how to wait. It was me that was running out of time.

The way I saw it, the choice was simple. There had been enough pain, there still was. So much so that my body kept trying to unpeel itself from my skin, to jump out and escape. And I couldn’t focus on it because all I heard was screaming, everyone screaming their opinions in my head. But it could end, here, now. My heart could beat, and beat again, and then beat no more. I could make this my last breath and just let go. It would be a blessing really, the lack of pain, the lack of noise. Death would welcome me more gracefully than life had. And it would be ok because I would win, you know? I would be gone, but I would be the one with the last word, for once. They needed me, they needed my blood, and it would be gone, like me. It was the only choice, really.

But then how do you explain it to two people who are willing to die to keep you alive? How do you tell strangers that they will fail? How do you tell someone you’ve just met that they will die?

Claire, who doesn’t know me, and fights my arms until I let her stick that IV back in. Claire, who punches a million medicines into the saline bag and begs me to breathe, just breathe. And Matt, who is blind but chooses to see, Matthew who starts to patrol the room like a soldier on a fort. Two strangers who adjust my clothes and tuck me in and ask me to rest, and I can’t tell them that I can’t rest because this bed is too soft, and this room is all wrong, and love doesn’t fit in my chest like it should.

How do I tell them everything, how do I tell them anything, when the one thing that they need to know keeps getting stuck in my throat?

Thank you. I think I said it as they left the room. The only thing I knew how to say. It would not be enough to save a life.

.

__Claire_ _

“You know you could just stay here,” his voice was stones and velvet, wrapped in the stare of a demon.

“No.”

It was easy to say no to the devil. But the hurt in those beautiful hazel eyes was only Matt Murdock’s.

“I’ll come back,” I conceded, I couldn’t help it. “Tonight. Tomorrow maybe. To check on her…”

_To check on you_. 

My friend was hurting and when he wasn’t running around disguised in horns and self-righteousness, he was the man that I had to actively stop myself from falling in love with.

The storm in his gaze settled into a wavy shore that was focused somewhere on my nose. He looked so Goddamn young with his wide eyes and messy hair. His hoodie was zipped only half-way and the hood was bunched up like a pet on his shoulder. The devil hid somewhere between the set of his lips and the bruises on his fist. The devil I hated. The devil I loved. The devil that set me free. I chased him away with a quick peck on his brow, a stroke to his temple. I was rewarded with a half-smile that was all Matt.

“Thank you, Claire.”

I let myself fall, just a little bit, playing daredevil with a toe on each side of the line. I leaned in as far as I could without losing my balance, living on the edge, telling myself that perhaps there was no going back, not from this far in, it was too late, there was only one way left. I pictured the devil ready to greet me and exactly what it would feel like, to be this free, to be only his. Then I stepped away from the forbidden and walked out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's something about writing Claire, I just can't get enough.  
> As for Blue, hang in there. I hope she finds the strength to. I hope you all do. Shit doesn't last forever. I promise.


	8. The wait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stick had taught me how to land, how to shift and turn and twist in the air to maximize an impact. But as I moved closer to Claire's lips, to that breath that came thick and fast like blood from her chest, I realized that I still hadn't learned how to fall.

_Claire_

Nothing prepared you for the wait, for the moment before, for that endless in between. Dread filled days and sped the clock's hands, until every tick counted. I tried, and failed, to fill a lifetime between each breath. There just wasn't enough air.

I spent my evenings running from the devil, comforted by the knowledge that he would never give up the chase. He was my last act, my last choice, the last bit of destiny that I could control. I couldn't explain why I needed to say no, when I wanted to say yes. Maybe I just wanted the option to be there, waiting for me, when I wasn't sure that a tomorrow would be.

Fear found its space, diluted in too many hours, dressed in super-senses and evenings of nothingness that dripped endlessly onwards like a leaking tap. I wanted to believe that he would be enough to keep me safe. Even when he wasn't there, I found comfort in searching for the silhouette of the devil in the shadows.

.

The devil was restless, waiting for a war that just wouldn't come.

He hovered by the trunk that hid his truth, one hand in, one hand out, torn between two selves. He ran his hands through the thick fabric and slammed the trunk shut, walking away. But the magnet was always pulling, gravity had shifted and the call to arms was stronger than the wait.

I found Matt Murdock asleep in the devil, head abandoned on the table, his two sides colliding in a blur.

.

The girl thrummed to life in a pulse that was invisible to my ears. The pain was unspoken as she curled towards death, always perched between a sigh and a whimper. But the silence rang with warning of resilience and hidden weapons that kept the end a whisper away.

The girl didn't know why she lived to die in another war, and she never asked the question. I continued to fix her body until her mind could reach that fork in the road.

.

Matt asked and I listened, but I didn't spend the night. The choice, my choice, hung heavy in the space between his lips and my ears.

I waited for the question every night, knowing there was only one answer. And still I waited, because life bloomed somewhere in the moment where there were still two options.

I waited, afraid of the day that the question would not come. Afraid of the choice that I had made. Afraid of the time I would want to answer 'yes'. But mostly afraid of when a silence would mean no.

.

I washed captivity away with warm water and soap. The girl bristled at my touch and faded, eyes blank. Her skin blossomed half-healed, the white patches a canvas for life.

It took a long time for her locks to turn into hair. I rubbed them in softness and combed them into shape. She let me crop the ends with Matt's kitchen scissors, uncaring or unafraid, until loose curls sprang forth like blossoms and cascaded in waves off her bony shoulders.

She let them fall to cloud her face, fingers running over the cherub texture of a lock, until her hand fell as low as her gaze, and she let this last remnant of who she was hang behind her, unwanted.

.

I hovered in my apartment, searching for myself within four walls, a needle probing for North. I willed the hours to pass in the emptiness, the lack of purpose aching like a cramp in my fingers that I couldn't stretch out.

I decided to look for work, made it half-way to my laptop, opened a new page to create a cv, but the emptiness stared back at me, whiter than the page. Blank was all I was now. A white page waiting to be filled.

I returned to the devil religiously, studiously, like clockwork, a moth to a flame, a junkie needing their fix. As I turned the key in his lock, each day I told myself that this was not where I belonged. I lied as I searched through the empty and his sight filled me up.

.

It took a week before she could stand, a stubborn piece of jello that wobbled her way back into the land of the living. She swatted our help away with the fire in her eyes as her feet tasted the ground. There was nothing careful about the steps that she took, toes first and heels next, a jagged moonwalk forward, sprinting, stumbling, stomping in abandonment towards the light.

She stood by the window on unsteady legs and she watched the world that was robbed from her eyes. Her head didn't waver even after her muscles collapsed, dragging her body behind. She used her fingers to pry herself up, two hungry eyes spying reality through a tinted pane.

We found her asleep on the floor, at home in the solid, her fingers still clutching possessively at the windowpane. We never managed to convince her to return to the bed. The floor beckoned her like an anchor to the world and she rested, the painted glass coloring her wait.

_._

_Matt_

The city thrummed with life as I filtered for the blank that was my war. Each rustle of the wind whispered like a sword unsheathed for death. The silence echoed with the footsteps of an army. The darkness was unforgiving as the crimson and ruby of my senses refused to find the fight that I was waiting for.

I stayed on the roof, perched like a watchful gargoyle, a frozen statue in the freezing winter wind, waiting, waiting. Waiting with clenched fists like they could contain the devil unpeeling from my skin.

The wait made no sense, ringing with questions, brimming with a sense of safety that tasted like poison. I waited until each day became night and the silence became Claire's careful heart. Her pulse drummed like snowflakes in my chest.

.

"You brought food," I said, and she jumped a little, but mostly she filled like an absence as she turned my way.

Warmth and saltiness spilled from the bag she was carrying, from the creases of her exposed skin between the layers protecting her from winter, and I drank her in like a breath I was holding.

"Do you think she'll be up to eating with us?" This was professional Claire, I'm here as a nurse Claire, steady hands unpacking plastic containers brimming with aromas, pounding full of secrets that reached me louder than the words that she didn't want to speak.

"Only one way to find out," I said, and I listened for the girl who was becoming so much more human each day, so much less alive as her silence filled with memories. She was sitting on her knees, hands against the window, as if in prayer to her own little miracle, watching, always watching, in a way that made me jealous of her sight. What I wouldn't give for a peak at the spectacle that the world really was, for that ordinary blur of colors and shapes that was so bright in my memories. Hell, I'd settle for a glimpse of the night so that I could count the colors that made the world black.

Claire moved quietly to the bedroom door, her arm almost brushing mine as she moved past, rising goosebumps like a craving on my skin.

"Come on kid, time to eat" she said, gentle but sure. The girl did something that resembled a semi-shrug and detailed exactly how uninterested she was, how unhungry, before turning back to the window, her curls making the air spiral around her like a tornado.

"It wasn't a question," Claire warned, and there was enough Claire in the words for the girl to unfold herself from the floor and follow Claire out of the bedroom. Her walking had improved since her first days but she still carried herself with the determined unsteadiness of a toddler more intent on reaching a destination than on figuring out the how. Each step tethered her towards the floor but she made it to the table on two legs, her heart pumping firmly from the exertion.

We sat, an unmatched trio on mismatched chairs, three strings braided together towards one end. Claire dished out three portions of some kind of pasta with a sauce that smelled like tomatoes and meat and celery and oregano, steam rising in rivulets and settling in the quiet between us.

I took a fork and began to eat. It was rich and heady and hot, enough to fill the craving next to the emptiness that laid me bare, that I slowly packed with the sound of Claire's lips, with the smell of her hair, with the balance of her breath. The emptiness that I would seal before I allowed it to be there, a weakness whose presence was entirely her choice.

I took another bite and willed this hunger to be enough, to be the only one that I would quench, the textures and flavors coating my tongue ringing with the tastes I wasn't allowed to sample. I told myself to get a grip, _get a grip Matt_. But Claire was just so warm today, so warm after the winter and the wait of the hours outside, so warm she was blistering my skin and the burn flared somewhere deep.

_._

_Blue_

I prodded at the food with the tip of my fork, tossing and turning the mouthfuls around the plate as I wished they would just disappear. I took a bite just to cut through the silence that filled the room, so dense and charged and awkward that I could almost see the sparks, hear them pop like fireworks. But the food tasted like home and easy smiles and days where fighting over the correct ways to cook pasta was the essence of life. Memories rose like bile in my throat and I couldn't swallow another bite. I dropped the fork back onto the table with a clang that was too loud and still not enough.

"So. You got a name?" Claire was never one to tip-toe around a problem, she charged forward like a bull to a matador and worried about the swords later. Matt shifted and paused by not pausing, stabbing his food with a little too much tempo, a little too much 'I don't care', but his head froze just enough to filter through the silence and catch my answer the moment it ran through my lips.

I watched him pause and still in that red leather outfit he kept changing into and out of, a costume choice that brought me no answers but he wore like a thousand well-kept secrets. I watched him to challenge his eyes to meet mine, to drag an answer straight out of my soul, but they remained flitted somewhere in between, the only blind part of his body.

And Claire ate, unfazed, as if this was casual dinner conversation between three people that were not mostly half-people, human leftovers of some kind of cruel cosmic joke. I picked up my fork for something to do, for something to look at instead of her eyes. I knew she'd meet mine with the kind and pitying 'I will fix this' stare, or the hard and fierce 'I will fix this' stare. I didn't know which was worse.

There was nothing left to fix. Bone and sinew could stitch themselves back into a body, organs could resume their shiny plumpness of efficiency, but there was nothing to do, nothing to fix, when a person was erased. Just a name that didn't belong stubbornly etched into the fibers of paper, forgotten amongst the squiggly rubber scraps of an eraser.

I shook my head in quick short bursts. I half-shrugged when my 'no' didn't feel quite right.

Yes. There was a name. No. It wasn't mine.

Claire took that into her stride, like she'd taken anything I'd thrown her way: add it to the pile of weird and carry on. Claire was good with weird. This wasn't her first rodeo.

"A nickname maybe?" she asked mid-chew, like she didn't care.

Names, nicknames, aliases. So many fingerprints trying to anchor us to a body. What happened when the name matched the fingerprints but not the person?

I wet my lips playing for time but the residues of sauce still tasted like home and I clung to the fork as I rode the ache, slow and heavy like a freight train.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Claire was ever the healer, the therapist, trying to heal each piece of me like they could help her put herself back together. I wanted to throw the question right back at her, at Matt, until they stopped lingering on the edge and cleared the sparks with their hands.

"It may help," she prodded gently, like I was a stubborn noodle in her plate that could be coaxed into climbing on her fork. Sure, talking helped. When there was something to find you, something to save. Talking would have helped before. But now? Now there was nothing left to say.

I listened to the traffic flow beneath us, wishing I could be back at the window. I'd memorized every nook and cranny of this view, every jagged corner of the windows, every dent in the brick walls. I'd watched the traffic lights change until I could predict their sequence and follow it with my eyes closed. I'd watched the tide of people milling about in their little lives, trying to imagine a place where I would have fit if I had been a person who still had a tomorrow. Heck, if I had been a person.

But here on this chair I was lost, stuck between a table and an unwanted conversation. I couldn't remember the rules of being human. I asked the only question that was left in my present.

"Where…?" my voice was hoarse and weak and so unlike my own that I stopped short, once again lost in a body that I couldn't understand anymore.

"Where am I? Where are we?" I continued, persisting, ignoring the coarseness of my vocal cords.

"You're safe," Matt was playing the hero, but that was not what I wanted to ask.

"This is Matt's place," Claire's answer probed like an x-ray, looking for a brain injury that would suddenly make me lose my bearings. But no, they didn't understand, and I shook my head in frustration.

"Hell's Kitchen. New York," I wasn't sure if blindness made people better listeners, but as he cocked his head between bites, it seemed that Matt was the only one who could hear my questions.

I nodded and nodded some more, until the irony of always having wanted to come to New York and be careful what you wish for stopped blocking the air on its way to my lungs. I moved to the next question like a leap between slippery stones perched precariously in a torrent of pain.

"When," the syllables stroked my tongue like knives, "when is it?"

It wasn't even a question, it wasn't even English, but as I braced myself for the knowledge, it was all that I could choke out.

Claire had stilled too now, carefully placing her fork down on the table, buying time because this was a part of the conversation that she'd hoped we wouldn't cross. Matt folded his limbs like he was ready for a business meeting, like he wasn't wearing a red leather onesie and trading between bowls of pasta. I watched their attitudes and I slipped a little from my rocks, a foot splashing loudly in the pain.

"November," Matt said carefully, professionally. It occurred to me for the first time that this man probably had a job outside of these walls, a job that had trained him to keep answers close to his chest like a good hand in poker.

I looked at Claire, straight into the gentle 'I can fix this' pity eyes and watched her nurse training hand me the truth, sterile and sharp like a scalpel: "2015."

I heard it like a punch that knocked the air right out of my lungs and gripped me into a stone-cold vice of barbed-wire. The years they had stolen throbbed in shock-waves until the room started shaking from the earthquake. There was no magnitude to its destruction, no Richter scale to define it, I was the epicenter and its end and I shook with it, shook until I became a blur.

I saw them stand to steady me, arms out like bannisters for steep stairs and I moved before they could reach me. But this was a house without rooms, a house with half-walls, a house where secrets and privacy got mushed together with broken lives like unfitting puzzle pieces. Loneliness bounced off the tinted windows and spilled out of the doors that wouldn't close until we were forced to wear each other's skins.

I lunged for the stairs that Matt kept disappearing through, hoping they would bring me to another level, hoping they could open another world. I heaved my lungs through breaths of fire and forced my legs to keep moving, even though each step was like a mountain, even though my knees were shaking so badly that they knocked into the stairs like bowling bowls to pins. I burst through the heavy door a heaving mess with nowhere to go, inhaling quick bursts of knife-sharp cold air in the dark.

I watched the city that wasn't mine continue sparkling in the night, breathing, breathing until the air tasted like freedom and two became the number of visible stars in the sky instead of the years that I had lost.

_._

_Claire_

He didn't ask. And maybe that was fine, because it was still early. I was still eating. He was still eating. We were still eating.

The girl had broken like old china and we'd let her run off to piece herself back together. She'd barely made it to the roof, scuttling like a beetle desperate to hide from the light that was shining too bright on her secrets. I knew she'd be safe coated in Matt's senses.

But her absence had shrunk the room and I watched silence seep from the cracks in our skin and the corners of our lungs until it filled the space between us, dense and noxious and shaped like smoke. One beat, two beats, and it started to change, sizzling louder than grey static. The fork became slippery in my hands and I struggled to chew through unspoken words. Matt prodded at the pasta by my side but he too seemed to get lost on his way to his mouth. Our appetites became forks teasing plates as we forgot what to do with them.

Matt was still wearing the devil and I saw him reflected in the tick of his jaw as it ground. Although what, I wasn't sure, the food now scattered and fleeing at the edges of his plate. The billboard chased the reddish hues around his hair, the only light in the room. I wondered when we had stopped remembering to turn on the lights in this house, whether it was because of the blind man and her prisoner at home in the shadows, or was it me that had just realized that I too belonged somewhere in the sharp click that turned light to dark.

Matt took a deep breath, inhaling the whole room in one steadying, chest-swelling, shoulder-rising swoop. I watched the muscles work to manipulate the air, his slightly parted lips as he bid it goodbye, and the sound swirled in my chest like a hurricane. The room felt too small, there wasn't enough breath left in it and this man, this man, this man was beating harder than my pulse.

I stood so quickly that I even startled myself, gathering plates and forks and feelings with quick, confident, efficient swipes of the table. I placed the leftover pasta back in the containers and the containers in the fridge and my pulse in the nonsense where it belonged. Matt watched me with his ears, I ignored him with my eyes, knowing full well what he would be seeing, hoping he had the sense to understand that he was seeing nothing. I just had to go.

But he still hadn't asked.

I stood and I waited for the words to come, for some words to come, some Claire that could tell him that's that, job done, see you tomorrow, or some Matt that would gently ask me to stay. I watched his slightly parted lips still, like an invitation, like a dare. It was up to me to give them purpose, to fill them with words or busy them with silence. I had to reach for my coat before my heart could bump into him.

_And he still hadn't asked_. Not that I cared, not really. It was just a formality, a little stroke to my ego. We both knew I was going to say no. I always said no. I'd made my choice, he respected my choice…Oh gosh just fucking ask me, Matt.

I chased after my shoes in the corridor, prodding with my toes in the dark. The billboard didn't shine this far, and I moved slowly, the only blind person in the room. The devil followed me at ease, a careful glide smoother than his armor, stalking, prowling like a lion to its prey, silent and confident and deadly.

My heart did a little run of its own picturing just how right it would feel to be captured in this particular set of jaws. I took in the leather woven into metal, inadvertently looking for the zipper that separated Matt from the devil.

My pulse only fueled his stride, guiding him straight as an arrow. His arms flexed and shifted the air as they rose to my sides, pausing an inch from my head to spread his palms on the wall behind me, trapping me in the most delicious cage in the world. His tendons vibrated with power, with the sheer force and brutality of punches and pain. I had witnessed the wrath that his arms could bring. And still, this close to the devil, I couldn't bring myself to be afraid.

Matt leaned, as slow as you please, until the space between us shrunk like a breath, until even I could see the world on fire, until he was too close but too far, and I knew that I was right where he wanted me to be.

_._

_Matt_

Claire was lying, all steady confident movements and the pulse of a squirrel. I knew she was lying and she hadn't even said a word. She picked up her coat and searched for her shoes and she lit up like a fucking Christmas tree, like a fucking highway, all signs and lanes and symbols as bright as cherries ripe for the picking. I followed them willingly, languidly, patiently. I let her lead me home.

I forced myself to go slow as I trapped her between my arms. I wanted each move to count until she was caught in her own lie. My body yearned to flex and tear and hurt after so long stuck in the wait. I let each tendon find release pressed into the wall behind her. I needed her to say it, to say yes, to take her decision and crash it in her palm.

"Claire," I whispered feather light into the hollow behind her ear, into the cluster of vessels that was thrumming neon bright. Small hairs down her neck rose in salute. She suppressed a shiver, a clenching effort of muscle and sinew that ricocheted my breath back onto my lips.

Ta-thump, ta-thump, ta-thump, the rhythm of her heart bumped into my chest and her steady, steady, only business hands started trembling at her sides.

I let another lungful brush her neck where her carotid was pulsing waves of Claire flavoured air into my mouth, tracing her without contact, my palms placed firmly into the wall behind her, fingers pressing hard enough to leave a dent.

_Say it Claire, say it._

My nose skimmed her hair and I drank her in, swallowing every particle that was trapped between the strands. She tasted so warm I almost drowned. My lips tingled with need, but I kept them finger-width apart from her flesh as I clenched my arms harder into the wall.

There were words, maybe there were words coming from her mouth. I swallowed convulsively at the wet smack of her lips, listening to her tongue twist in her mouth. I got lost following her breath in her throat and the solid air separating us was almost too much. I let it solidify into a wall of paper and handed her the match.

_Claire say it_ , let it burn, let me burn, let us burn.

I inched closer, slowly, my muscles tensing to pounce, pumping with adrenaline, but my movements locked. It was a dance, choices swirling scalding and true, and I trailed my lips leisurely down the neck, never touching, breathing in the space just above her collarbone. She stifled a moan, a noise generated deep and primal, a 'yes' that steady, steady Claire didn't want to give.

The highway lit up neon bright with all the buttons I shouldn't press, all the buttons I wanted to press. My fingers scratched into the wall like they could crush the distance between us.

She was so fucking warm, I could feel it between all the layers, I could feel it like she was pressed up against me, and I wanted more, I wanted all of it. I wanted to burn and blister in her touch. My cells yearned and screamed and yanked at the fabric separating us, but her hands stayed down, shaking, shaking like an earthquake and I waited for the no as her pulse thumped yes, yes, yes against my waiting lips.

"Matt," I didn't hear her voice as much as I felt it, tongue stroking her teeth in a firm lash that made my lips prickle like a bruise.

"Yes?" I answered, sound brushing somewhere down her neck.

"This doesn't end well," I was pleased to hear her throat strangle her tone.

"Oh, I think this ends very well," I exhaled against that spot in her collarbone that was calling out my name.

She let out a choked noise and cleared her throat, swallowing loudly. I followed the sound up and down her neck, trying to breathe through the temptation, while her smell invaded my sinuses and settled like fog in my brain. Her trembling fingers made the air ripple at her sides and I added them to the list of things that were making me come undone.

"We can't," she whispered, and her voice was so so soft, I wanted to wear it.

"We shouldn't," I told the air separating our mouths.

And it was true, so very true, we really _really_ shouldn't. But as her fingers finally wavered to the back of my head and each of my nerves sparked like dynamite, it was all I could do not to moan that we fucking should should should.

She slowly stroked the nape of my neck with tendrils of fire and my back arched in response, the wall groaning with the force of restraining my arms. I inched closer, slowly, tortuously, feeling her choice crumple with every bit of pressure she applied against my neck, gently tearing through paper thin walls and wills and excuses between us. I slowed until I could almost feel the particles of air shifting in front of me and Claire was nothing if not brighter than the sun.

Stick had taught me how to land, how to shift and turn and twist in the air to maximize an impact. But as I moved closer to Claire's lips, to that breath that came thick and fast like blood from her chest, I realized that I still hadn't learned how to fall.

"Stay," I pleaded, my gasp in her mouth, stroking through her lips. I waited, stilled amongst the throbbing, throbbing everywhere. I waited for the yes that would set me on fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my defence, I really hand't planned for this.


	9. Something stupid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was something inexplicably sexy about being trapped a hairbreadth away from Matt Murdock's lips. I mean, just the sight of him. I almost didn't want him to kiss me because this distance, this wait, was so excruciatingly sweet and painful that it made my stomach contract, butterflies be damned. This, right here, this was my something stupid and Jesus, I was just going to have to make it stupid enough. I wanted this to shine brightest when my time came.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Explicit sexual content in this chapter. If you have sensitive eyes, I suggest you stick to the paragraphs by Blue (beginning and end).
> 
> Otherwise, I hope you enjoy!

_Blue_

When I was young I wanted super-powers. I tried to fly and climb the walls, I smacked bricks with my fists. When none of that worked, I willed myself to be invisible, to move things with my mind. If you could think it, I'd test it and trust me, I tried them all. It's funny what we wish for when we don't know that we have the world.

No one told me powers could hurt. No one told me the price. And now that I knew it was an either/or, it was too late to change my mind.

The voices didn't scare me anymore. The low background buzzing nestled in my mind like a swarm of faithful bees: they'd be careful not to sting if I was careful not to jostle them too much. And I let them be, mostly. Partly because I didn't know how to turn them off. Partly because I didn't know how to turn them up. I was merely a strainer forced to capture all the little strands of thought that drained from the minds nearby.

Except for in moments like these where my veins flared and sang with acid because some thoughts exploded louder than bombs. It just happened that I got sprayed with shrapnel, an unfortunate bystander.

 _About damn time_ , I thought as I watched flickers of Matt's kisses turn Claire's knees into puddles. I scratched absentmindedly at the pain under my skin as I made myself more comfortable perched on the edge of the roof, legs dangling in flight. It looked like I'd be stuck here for a while.

_._

_Claire_

It's funny how we spend our lives avoiding the mistakes. Get a job. Pay your bills. Don't eat that extra piece of cake. Keep yourself alive and hope to stumble into happiness on your way home.

It's funny because the moments that are worth it, the ones where you forget to breathe and life hits you harder than a punch, those moments, well, they are never on purpose. Life hides in the mistakes that we pretend we didn't want to make, in that feeling where gravity sends you soaring through the air, in those instants right before the earth-shattering repercussions that knocked you to your knees, in the how you got that cataclysmic karma that you never really shook off. Life is the something stupid that we just have to do, just because we know better.

I believe that when you reach that last breath, and your life supposedly flashes before your eyes, it won't be those healthy good-for-you days that will be streaking past. No, your heart will thump to the beat of those oh so-stupid-moments that made you feel alive. And when they'll ask, you will tell them, with an all-knowing smile, that life was fucking worth it.

There was something inexplicably sexy about being trapped a hairbreadth away from Matt Murdock's lips. I mean, just the sight of him. I almost didn't want him to kiss me because this distance, this wait, was so excruciatingly sweet and painful that it made my stomach contract, butterflies be damned. This, right here, this was my something stupid and Jesus, I was just going to have to make it stupid enough. I wanted this to shine brightest when my time came.

I lived a thousand lifetimes in the space between our lips. Matt was still, lingering between need and doubt, between wishes and reality. I absorbed every second of his hesitation, the tenderness in his respect, unwavering even when every cell in my body was inviting him in. I absorbed his face in the semi-darkness, how his eyes were almost shut like they were already halfway there, in that kiss that I wouldn't give. I watched his lips, slightly parted to let out breaths that were too big for his chest. Those damned lips that I had stared at through each conversation, who had shattered something inside me every time they broke into a smile. Those lips that went still and thinned when the devil stole his face. The lips that had asked me not to fall when I was already on the ground. I watched them inch closer to my face, I watched him hesitate and want, I watched until I couldn't feel my legs. And still, I never wanted to close my eyes.

I played with the small hairs at the base of his neck, tracing a finger gently up through each vertebra in his spine until it got lost in the jungle of his locks. I felt his back bow like a cat's and luxuriated in the permission to do as I pleased, to not have to search for injuries. His body was my playground and I was going to take my time to try each set of swings and slides.

I ran my fingers down from the top of his scalp to the edge of his collar, nails against skin but light enough to itch instead of burn. I traced my fingers like a match teasing sparks, pausing before the flame. Matt inched closer until he was panting, breath hot and heavy in my mouth, and his arms spasmed and clenched in the wall behind me.

"Claire," he moaned somewhere very very close. I loved the way he could claim me with my name, how he made it only his to say. His breath teased my lips, light as a butterflies' pause before flying away, leaving me tingling on the inside of my bones.

It wasn't even a second, the length of time it took for me to gently place my lips on his. But I knew I'd always remember that feeling, that need, that want to sow his skin to mine. I'd always remember the depth of that abyss that lay between us as I crossed it in the dark.

He kissed me like a punch, like a clap of thunder. There was none of the hesitation of our first kiss, none of the gentleness. His lips crushed mine with the brute force of a starving man, of a caged animal finally let free. I expected nothing less from the devil. And it suited me just fine.

I tried to keep up with my breathing, I tried to remember how to stand, I tried to keep track of my hands but Jesus fucking Christ, Matt knew the exact way to make his kisses feel so deep that my soul spilled inside out. I clung onto his shoulders for dear life, cloying at his back, digging with my nails, but none of it even made a dent in that stupid armour.

"Armor off, Matt, take it _off_ ," I panted against his mouth. But just then his tongue found its way to mine and I forgot what I wanted to say. And still his hands stayed nailed to that damn wall like a painting on display.

Matt paused right before the moment where I was pretty sure I was close to seeing stars. He stilled with his bottom lip just close enough to tease mine and it was so unbearable that I let out a high-pitched whine that was more appropriate of a kicked puppy than a full-grown woman.

He tilted his head and closed his eyes, concentrating.

"Matt," I begged. He moved his right hand to still me, fingertip held against my chin. Wait, the finger said. But then it proceeded to trail the length of the inside of my neck and I shuddered so violently that my jaw rattled. I whimpered and grasped that bottom lip, letting it slide slowly through my teeth in vengeance.

It was Matt's turn to crumple, muscles falling in a heap against my chest and an unmistakeable hunger painting his face. But he pulled himself away, once more, trying to catch his breath with his forehead pressed against mine.

"Wait," he pleaded, "just. Let me check." Every word reached my skin before my ears in big bold brushes of fire.

"Check what?" I let a hand fall like smack onto his chest and let gravity pull it down, slowly but purposefully, making sure that he could feel the pressure through the thick cloth.

He made a noise half-way between a groan and a growl, back bent like a question mark, lips falling into a rough kiss that wouldn't be contained.

"I need to…" he gasped as my hand reached his ribcage as it opened wider than a bear-trap.

"Check…" he paused again, tight abs chiselled even through the material. I took my time feeling each swell and dent while my insides swooped like I was going down a set of particularly steep stairs.

"If she is going to come back anytime soon," he said the rest in a huffed jumble that made my lips move with his. I had forgotten all about the girl on the roof. I had forgotten pretty much everything, really.

He tore himself away with another strangled groan, his arms trembling as he struck the wall behind me, and crushed his head on my shoulder, fighting for restraint. I continued down, nearing his hip bones, then lower, and lower, until right before. I watched him shake, fight not to arch forward. Then I took my hand back and let it fall to my side like it was never there.

His eyes popped open in response and I knew he would have glared at me if he could. He moved his forehead into the wall so that his mouth could speak directly into my ear.

"Claire, you need to let me check because what I'm going to do to you, well, let's just say once I start you won't want me to stop," it was his turn to trace a finger gently down the length of me, his voice low and confident and deadly. I shivered and held tighter to his shoulders.

He let his lips do the tracing now, showing me just how useless hands could be. Matt read my skin like a book in braille, stilling at all the pressure points that were connected directly to my core, so that I almost came there and then as he tasted each with his tongue, as he nipped and kissed and ravaged my skin until I struggled to stand.

"Does," I started, but Matt's lips were nearing my collar bone and the rest of my sentence became an 'mmmmmm'.

Words, come on words. Come back to me.

"Does your…" This time it was an 'ahhh' as he licked the top of my breasts, leaving trails of ice and fire.

"Bathroom," I huffed. Clearly there was too much talking because Matt decided to busy my mouth with his. There was one more little word that I had to find a way to say, one more and then even the question mark could be forgotten in the feel of his tongue.

I had my whole brain cheering me on, come on Claire, one more word and we can shut down for good. But then what a waste to use my mouth to speak when Matt just tasted so Goddamn amazing, and maybe lips weren't created to talk after all. It seemed mine were created to do just this.

I took advantage of the millisecond I had while Matt moved from the corner of my mouth to the start of what was hopefully another delicious trek down my body to say: "Lock."

He paused and I didn't blame him. Pulling my half-murmured words into a coherent sentence was more than could be asked of anyone right now. I'd even forgotten what I was trying to say myself, having had to concentrate so hard on the one word at the time. My mind now worked in images and simple halted sentences like a telegram – Me and Matt –(STOP)- Bathroom –(STOP)- Locked door –(STOP)- The end of the world as we know it –(STOP)-.

"Matt?" I think I wanted to ask if he understood, but mostly I just wanted to say his name.

Then his hands were finally, FINALLY on me, and he scooped me up in his arms and headed for the bathroom. I let the devil drag me to the hottest plinth of hell, and damn, it wasn't hot enough.

.

_Matt_

I couldn't even. Gah. It's like there wasn't enough of me do everything I wanted to do to Claire in each moment. And she was just. God. Did she realise what she was doing to me?!

I had to keep my arms on the wall not to crush her. I had to keep my hands away to concentrate, one sense at the time, on the Claire that was in front of me, warm and alight and so wet I could smell it, I could fucking smell it through her clothes and I just wanted to, I just needed to. _I had to keep my hands on the wall._

I don't know how we made it to the bathroom, my senses united on that one spot that was calling me home. I couldn't see anything else. I couldn't feel anything else. I couldn't hear anything else. I just knew that Claire was carving an imprint in my arms and I never wanted to let go. And Jesus, she was brighter than the sun and just as warm. I was basking in her glow.

I set her down when the world started smelling like old pipes and stagnant water, hoping that meant we were in the right room. Frankly, I didn't care. I missed her weight the second it left my skin, but my hands were no longer willing to still. The bathroom lock clicked like the gun signalling the start of a race and I was already running.

I searched for the heat of her mouth as my hands ran races of their own. The path was clear, marked in big bold red letters. I didn't even need to look. Her breasts were first, they had to be first when they were jutting out like that. I felt their weight in my palms, running them past the bra that squeezed me tighter to her skin. She moaned deep when my index found her nipple, hardening at my touch, the sound starting shivers on my tongue that ended somewhere lower and became one with the pulsing.

I moved one of the hands to her hair, fingers combing through their silkiness, searching for each cadence in that scent that made her so uniquely Claire. I never wanted to breath anything but her again.

And then I couldn't help it, I moved my hand down without even asking, feeling her back curve at my touch and I pushed it past her jeans and into the core of her heat, fingers slipping straight into the opening that was waiting just for me. I felt her walls tremble, already on the edge, I felt her sigh as her knees gave in and her legs spread ever so slightly, but I was going to take my time, feel her flush, swallow each moan as I made her mine.

Claire unbuttoned her jeans, an invitation if there ever was one, but there was not time to pull them down. I took both her wrists in my free hand and moved them to the wall. They could keep each other company as we burned.

Claire didn't fight me but her fingers curled as I gently found her clit, sliding my thumb on it just once before slipping my fingers back inside, testing the response. She clenched like a hiccup, bit her lip, released. I kissed her neck, slowly, from jaw to collarbone and back, while she whimpered and rocked gently against my hand. I circled her clit once again, giving her what she needed, just not enough.

"God. Matt," she begged, wrists struggling in my hands, and the sound of her tongue moving was too much. I closed her lips with mine and moved my hands in big long strokes, gentle and slow, back and forth, until she was swaying harder than my movements and she started tightening against my fingers. Then I moved both my hands to her breasts, feeling their weight land hot and heavy in my groin. I moved my lips down her jaw, down, down, between her breasts, burying my face in the softness and the heat, moving to suck at each nipple, grazing them with my teeth, vaguely aware of how Claire's hands moved from the wall to my shoulders to my hair, how she started pulling, how she started groaning. I followed the heat, down, down, I kissed her stomach and freed her from her jeans in one swift tug that annoyed me, because it required both my hands and there were so many other places that I wanted them to be right now.

And finally I was there, and she was wetter than my mouth, and I could taste her and fuck, I couldn't stop my tongue from running over the silkiness, I couldn't stop pressing that heat, and her hands were pulling at my hair, and her knees were bending her weight lower and tighter against my lips, and I thought I should tell her not to scream, but I was too busy drowning in the drumming of her heart.

I watched the flush rise like the sun on her chest, grow to her face. I felt the blood pulse like a shore against my tongue, and followed its rhythm, while the air filled her lungs louder than water. I had my fingers inside her just in time to feel her clench, tight, again, and again, and again. She clutched onto my neck like I could support her weight as she flew, but she didn't know, she didn't realise I was holding on by a thread, and just her bare fingers on my neck were enough to make me throb and beg to come undone.

I took my hand away and stood against her like she was a wall, trying to breathe through air that wouldn't still, trying to land with her. But Jesus, she was too much. Hands against wall. _Hands. Against. Wall_.

Claire barely paused. She placed her forehead against mine and tugged at the collar of my suit with frantic hands. She didn't ask. Maybe she couldn't ask. Her hands did the talking. I guided her fingers to where the zip was hidden on the side of my chest. I couldn't stop trembling as the little metal teeth set me free. But there was too much air around me, not enough Claire. I needed to feel all of Claire.

I clutched at her top, scrunching it in my hand, and for a minute that was all I could do because Claire's fingers were so close to my skin, so fucking close. Claire paused and placed my hand on my own zipper while she removed her top, her bra, her jeans, her underwear. Each garment fell to the ground like autumn leaves and I was stuck in the beauty of how her skin glowed with warmth, so bright I could hear it like an angel's song. I couldn't move and I wished, I fucking wished I was allowed to see the glory that was in front of me. Because she deserved to see that look on my face, that look that told her just how beautiful she was.

"What's wrong?" Her hand was tentative and gentle against the side of my face, genuine concern colouring her tone. And even that set me on fire.

"I just," define yourself by what you have, value the differences, make no apologies for what you lack. Fuck. How stupid was this. How useless was I. She deserved more.

"I just wish I could see you right now," damn that sounded wrong, you are a lawyer Matt, you are supposed to be good with words. "I mean, I wish I could see you every day, I wish I could see everything. But now, you just deserve to be seen right now."

She turned her head to the side and I couldn't read the expression on her face. I extended one palm hoping to feel it, but instead she pressed her face firmly against the only bit of skin that was free of the suit so that I could feel her lips turn into a smile.

"You see…I mean, your world on fire…it mostly works through sound, right?" she asked against my chest. I nodded because it was so hard to explain that sometimes even I struggled to understand.

"I have an idea," she said, moving backwards, "suit off, daredevil."

I obeyed. Or tried to. My fingers were shaking, the blood was in all the wrong place and it made me so clumsy that I almost broke the thing. But I tugged until I was free, suit at my feet like a discarded layer of skin, bare except for my boxers. Then I was searching for her, arm out, unsteady, blind.

I heard her twist the knob in my shower, the gurgle in my taps and then she stepped into the steaming spray. Water droplets hit the tile and bounced off the ceramic and I could draw the empty space. The rest smashed against her skin ringing like crystal in chandeliers, but each at a different angle, playing a different song. Her skin sang back, yielding to the pressure or fighting back, releasing its own perfume, little bits of Claire that had been hiding in the space between her cells.

It wasn't an impressionistic painting, not quite. It was a symphony of gold and curves, flickering and always unfinished. I tried to absorb each note like lyrics in a tune, knowing each would flit through my fingers before they could form a sentence. And even though I was trembling with need, even though I was straining against my boxers, even though the distance between us stung sharper than a blow, I couldn't stop looking, because she was perfect. Just perfect.

"Did it work?" she asked, louder than the spray, even when I could've heard her words just through the sound of her lips moving.

I crossed the bathroom in one stride, pausing only to drop my shorts, before joining her under the water. I watched her move to greet me as elegant as a jungle cat, taking her face in both my hands while I struggled to find the words. Words weren't enough in moments like these.

I kissed her tenderly, delicately, then more deeply, trying to convey what this meant to me. Her sigh was like a melody.

"I…you…" words stumbled against her lips, "Claire, you. You are beyond beautiful." I finished lamely, knowing it was too easy to dismiss my opinion, the 'well, you are blind' always waiting behind the lines. But I meant it, and instead of scoffing, she smiled into my skin and blushed softer than early morning light.

"Enough talking, choir boy," she teased, moving one hand straight to my balls and holding firm. I jumped like I had been electrocuted, my head slamming back so fast I almost got whiplash. I moved my hands to the wall again, steady, steady, breathe.

"So, these super-senses of yours…" she trailed an index up, lightly, along the shaft. And Jesus, fuck. Just FUCK. I couldn't breathe.

_._

_Claire_

He was like an Adonis, a Greek God chiselled from marble, finally naked, finally bare for no one but me to see. It felt like Christmas morning, like unwrapping a present I had begged for for months. I watched the water ripple down his toned muscles like the world's most wonderful fountain and I could barely tear my eyes away long enough to appreciate his face. And damn, it wasn't the perfect cut of his jaw, or the lushness of those lips, or even the innocence in his eyes, it was the way he was hesitating that made me feel like I was the most beautiful thing in the world. It made it hard to swallow.

The way he jolted every time I came near him was the cherry on top of the cake. Knowing how much he wanted me, physically, and how he couldn't hide it. The sheer power in my hands right now made me more dangerous than the devil. I clutched him in my palm, squeezing just the once. He almost fell over, smacking his hand hard against the wall and letting his head fall against my shoulder. I could feel him swelling against my pressure, I could hear his breath hitch with each pulse. I could only imagine how sensitive he must be to touch when he could smell a man's cologne from three floors down.

I kissed him, hard, biting his lower lip as I pulled up with my hand. He almost screamed, he almost pulled away, but I had him, right here, between my teeth, between my fingers. The devil was mine.

"Claire," he pleaded as I let go of his lips, breathing hard, hard, hard against my cheek.

"Yes?" I asked innocently, drawing him out, but this game had an end and we both knew it was in sight. I was ready for him, aching for him and I bet he could tell just how much.

"Condom?" he wheezed out, breath tumbling out of his lungs and eyes squeezed shut as he pounded his fist rhythmically against the wall, a distraction from my hand that was closing tighter and tighter and tighter around him.

"Pill," I answered, searching for his mouth, I didn't have time for so many words, I didn't have time for him not to be anywhere but deep inside me.

It took me the same time to find his lips as it took him to hitch my legs up with both his hands and let my back find the wall, until I was high enough and just above. I could feel him whisper against me as he twitched and I let a moan build inside, an echo of the heat.

I rocked my hips to let him inside, swayed down low until I could take all of him and then froze, absorbing the feel of fullness, of Matt, while he pressed his fingers in my thighs so hard it almost hurt. He didn't move, panting, rubbing his forehead against my chest, against my breasts, searching for a control but finding only me wherever he turned.

"Say it Matt," I whispered in his ear. I wanted to hear it. I wanted to have every part of him.

He only growled and nipped at my nipple. I shuddered, clenching without meaning to. He gasped and puffed.

"You have no idea," he paused, biting his lip, letting out a grunt, "how good. You feel. Claire." More breathing, heavy, slow, calculated.

I rocked my hips once, he kissed me like a fever.

"I can't," pause. Breathing. Cheek rubbed against mine. His eyes slammed shut, "I can't. Think."

"Then don't," I told him, rocking once more and placing my arms on his shoulder to hold myself up higher, to rock again, "let go Matt," I told him as I moved again, but talking was becoming impossible. I felt his fingers tighten against my hips as he thrust, once, deep. He pushed me higher, almost pulled out and then thrust again, making my head lock towards the heavens, his face buried in my shoulder. I felt his teeth sink into my flesh as he thrust again, and again, and again, harder, faster, deeper until I forgot all about his teeth, and his fingers leaving bruises on my hips and I wondered who was screaming before I realised that it was me.

I came harder than before, wrapped around his shoulders and his hips and felt his strangled cry of 'Claire' against my cheek as he rode my waves over the edge. I came with a gasp that closed my lungs and turned the world black, just for a second. There was only beauty in the blindness that was the feel of Matt pulsing inside me.

He sunk to the ground with a groan, head buried in my shoulder, knees on the floor of the tub and me sitting on his lap, still wrapped around him. We stayed on the floor, breathless, the spray of hot water hitting us both only on one side. I noticed the steam for the first time: it filled the room as thick as a fog. It felt like it had enveloped my insides, swirling around my joints, lulling my brain. I didn't want to move. Instead, I let my fingers find all the bumps on his skin where I had sown a little bit of me into a little bit of him. I was there, in each dent, each shadow of a stitch. I hoped his scars would remind him of me instead of all the ugly. It was comforting to know that he'd carry part of me with him, even if it was through an untidy mesh of broken skin. I guess I had already found a way to sow us together. I just had never realised.

Matt lifted his head finally, a pained expression on his face as he raised trembling fingers from my thighs. I noticed he was shaking underneath me, faintly.

"Matt? Are you ok?" I didn't need to speak loudly to make the sound travel the short distance between us.

"I'm way better than ok," he smiled, but then his face fell as he trailed his imprints on my hips and faintly raised bite marks on my skin. I couldn't feel their pain, but he could probably see the heat of the bruising waiting to blossom, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you," he murmured.

"Matt, trust me, you didn't hurt me, you," I paused, remembering stars, remembering how I wanted him to hold me tighter, remembering the feel of him, wanting him all over again, "It was. You were. Unbelievable."

He grinned then, fully Matt, a different Matt, a Matt I had never met. He was young and free and shy and real, and made it so damn hard not to fall. I took this bit of him away, folded it neatly in my heart, so it wouldn't get crumpled, so it would last, so it would be there for years to come.

.

We washed each other with his hypoallergenic scent-free soap after. Only he could make prescription soap feel like a gift. It made his hands glide on my skin in ways that almost felt better than sex. He let me stroke each of his muscles, one by one, his eyes closed. There was moaning, and lust, but we didn't do it again. Already kissing felt forbidden, even as we were unable to let any distance come between us.

We shared a big soft towel and shivered in the cold once we were clean. It was stupid, and inefficient, but it felt right. We stayed a little longer than we needed to get dry. I memorised the feel of his body pressed against mine like I knew it would be the last time.

He asked me to stay, once again, big hazel eyes fixed somewhere in my chest. I wasn't sure if he meant to, but it felt like he was talking directly to my heart. And my heart responded with all the yeses in the world, even as I said goodbye, with my eyes.

There was only pain on his face as I reached for my coat, raw and honest like this night had washed away all pretences, all walls, all masks. He sat there like an offering of all the beauty that life could hold. I couldn't bear it.

"Matt, tonight was," I faltered.

Tonight was my something stupid. The one thing I'd grab in a fire, my one suitcase I packed to take to the other side. I'd been afraid I couldn't make it shine bright enough. Now I knew it would be so bright that the rest of my life would pale in comparison. Tonight was everything, and he had to understand. But there was no way to explain how one night could change everything and still nothing at all.

I broke one last rule when I kissed him one more time, right by the front door. This time it was like our very first time, and his response was long, and gentle, hesitant and just so painfully sweet. I kissed him with the explanation I couldn't give, hoping that he would hear the answer between my lips. I kissed him until my heart hurt because now it knew exactly what it had to give up, and it was too much.

I left with the sweet taste of beginnings in my mouth and the goodbye stuck in my throat. I tried not to see his hand move to reach for me as I walked away.

_._

_Blue_

I stopped feeling the cold a long while before quiet footsteps joined me on the roof. I watched Matt cross the length of the floor and my mouth curved into a smirk. It felt strange on my lips, pulling my muscles in long-lost shapes, but I couldn't help it, knowing what I knew, seeing the what I saw. Matt was walking towards me with the unmistakable aura of a man who had just got laid: Joints looser, slight spring in his step, windswept hair and lips as lush as overripe cherries. But it was the fact that he was trying to cover it up that really made my lips curl, like a little boy who just had an extra helping of absolutely forbidden ice-cream and then denied it while his face was covered in chocolate.

I wondered if he had put his armour back on just for my benefit. I was grateful I wouldn't be forced to walk in on them naked, at least.

Matt didn't try to make conversation or pause for introduction, he simply claimed his own corner and crouched as if to spring. I focused on neutralising my facial expression, worrying that he could see it, somehow. I was starting to realise just how much truth there had been in Claire's statement that Matt was 'not as blind as the rest of us.'

We stayed as quiet as the night, each on its own edge of the world. It was strangely comforting to know that life leaped onwards when death backed it into a corner. I was glad to know at least some of us were living its best side.

The silence between us didn't feel wrong, it belonged in the stillness of the moment. But as it ticked on, I began to feel lonely, knowing the warm thoughts that would be keeping Matt company. I wanted to share them; it wasn't stealing. I just needed a glimpse to know what hope tasted like in this moment.

I tried to make my mind reach him, to dilute the voices and isolate his, but there was nothing tangible to stretch, no muscles to flex, it was like a fog that drifted in and out of my brain and filled it with noise. I knew I wasn't even close when the fire in my veins stayed muted like an old cup of tea.

Just then the horizon cracked open like an eyelid that spilled colours into the streets. I witnessed the new day unfold, wondering, like every day, if it would be my last.

Matt lifted his arm and I watched his fingers stroke the rays like a musician plucking strings.

"Can you see it?" I don't know what made me ask, maybe this nagging suspicion that there was something I couldn't see about Matt, something that was right there in front of me while I was busy looking everywhere else.

"No," he sighed.

The sun rose higher, slowly, painting the sky with every shade of pink and purple and red, taking its time like it knew it had an audience, like it was showing off.

"What does it look like?" he asked, quietly. His eyes were shut, like he wasn't looking on purpose.

What does dawn look like, really?

"Like the stars decided to look closer," I told him. His lips twitched.

I looked on, even though it made my eyes sting, like I had to look for the both of us. There was something about watching the sun rise, no matter how many or how few times it happened, something that slowed time and chiselled the moment into permanence.

"Do you miss it?" He didn't need to ask me what.

"I shouldn't, not when…I got so much more. But, yes,"

Nobody told you what you had to give up to get something more. Would we accept the power if we knew the price?

"Would you give it up? For this?"

_Would I give it up?_

He considered it for a long moment, fingers entwined in the trickles of sunlight. He stilled like a statue as he opened his eyes, pupils fixed on the horizon like he was daring them to burn. His suit was more gold than red in the dawn and Matt glittered like a flame in the new light.

"Come on, let's get you inside. You are burning up," that was all the answer I was going to get.

Maybe a yes had been too obvious. Maybe a no made him a monster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still here? You deserve all the kudos in the world.
> 
> Thanks for reading <3


	10. The only home I had

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in getting this to you, life (or rather death) got in the way. The next couple of chapters are already half written so should be getting to you more regularly :)

_Blue_

I found myself following Matt inside, but I wasn’t sure why. We lived perched in between making an agreement and I survived right there on the edge, that edge that changed his trying to save me into a prison. I watched him cross the roof in easy strides and I struggled to keep up. Yet as his legs moved smooth as water, his posture gave nothing away. And still I followed, because he was the only home that I had.

Matt tried to reach for me as we neared his stairs but seemed to think better of it when I flinched, settling instead for holding the roof door open. I considered his staircase with trepidation, each step stretched in front of me like an insurmountable obstacle, tiny enough to trigger a valley of shame, high enough to promise a mountain of pain. Matt hovered like a hesitant shadow as I took the first tentative paces down to his apartment, arms spread wide like I wanted to fly while I tried to balance the tremors in my legs with the flat of my palms against the bannister and the wall. He tactfully steered past me when I stopped to catch my breath after only four steps down, hating myself and my body and every burning breath that was tearing itself out of my lungs. I could feel him itching to play the hero, but he somehow found restraint. Matt understood that acknowledging weakness could only add weight as I drowned.

“How about some breakfast?”

There was no pity in his words, no indecision. I was grateful he was willing to give me the space to make my own mistakes, to fall if I had to, even when he wasn’t sure I knew how to pick myself back up.

Matt didn’t wait for me to answer, he was already in the kitchen skilfully manoeuvring in and out of the fridge and taking out bowls and spoons. I shrugged anyways, wanting to say no, like I did every waking moment of every day. My life had turned into shrugs that really just meant ‘no’.

“Come on, you haven’t eaten anything in days.”

It wasn’t that I had shrugged while his back was turned, it was more that he had somehow seen the shrug at all. Because he was _blind_. Wasn’t he?

“How do you do that?” My voice was still raspy, even more so from the hours spent outside. I tried to clear it.

“Do what?” He started breaking some eggs into a bowl.

“See,” I couldn’t think of a better way to put it.

I watched his shoulders tense, like he was choosing which way this conversation was going to go.

“There’s more than one way to see,” he said carefully.

“But you are blind,” it almost came out as a question because I just couldn’t say it as a statement anymore. I’d seen his eyes wonder aimlessly around the room. I’d seen their lack of expression. But Matt moved like he had eyes behind his head, or hidden somewhere in his pocket, like he was hooked to a complex CCTV system and the cameras replayed directly in his head. There was no hiding from Matt.

He paused midway through breaking an egg and angled his body so that it would face me, even when his eyes couldn’t.

“Yes, technically speaking, I am blind. As in my eyes don’t work.”

“So how…?” I gesticulated to all of him, a move which a blind person wouldn’t have seen. But he did.

“I can sense things.”

I made a point of staying extra still and silent until he took the hint and went on.

“When I became blind, it was an accident. It took away my sight, but it also amplified all of my other senses. Touch, smell, hearing, taste…They give me a sort of impressionistic painting of my surroundings, as well as making me know…things.”

“Things?”

He sighed and resumed breaking the eggs as he spoke. Each word was detached, like he was speaking about a friend or he had gone through this explanation so many times that he had accidentally smudged the emotion out of it.

“I can feel your fever from here. I can feel the fibres in your legs tense and tear. I can hear the air move in and out of your lungs like they were mine. And I can hear your heartbeat,” he paused, tilted his head and frowned, like he was triple-checking his notes and his favourite line had disappeared.

“Huh,” he said, stumped. His head twitched, re-adjusting the angle a couple of times.

“What?” I could almost feel his concentration coat my skin like a layer of oil. I wanted to scrub it off.

“It’s uh. Strange. Normally when I tell people these things their pulses pick-up, it makes them…uncomfortable, scared. But you…” he twitched again, his lips curving into an impressed smile that I wasn’t sure he realised he was wearing, “Your heartbeat. It’s… _slowing_. Like it’s…calming you down?”

I wasn’t sure if it was a question or if the question was the part of the sentence that he wanted answered. I decided to answer all of it and none at all.

“I don’t like not understanding,” I mumbled. And that was only partly true. His explanations sunk-in like he was lifting a blindfold from my eyes, allowing me to finally see the little corner of the world that had been equal parts a prison and a refuge so far. But mostly I didn’t feel like being able to read bodies equated to reading minds. I was in no place to judge.

Life leaked back into his voice, like my subconscious approval had freed something that had been trapped inside him, caged and hidden and repressed. Pride coloured his tone and his hands joined in on the conversation.

“It goes beyond that…I can taste what people ate and drank days after they’ve had it, as well as the individual ingredients in any food…I can smell weapons and hear them ring before they are even unsheathed. I can measure pulses and determine how many people are in the room. I can tell when people are lying – that one comes in very handy. It’s hard to explain the full extent of my abilities. But it makes me know things, helps me anticipate behaviour.”

He started whisking the eggs with quick flicks of his wrist. I wondered if he was aware that he was smiling. I concentrated on taking another two trembling steps down and waited while my legs seized in protest. The fever swelled and swirled around me like hot soup until the rays coursing through the tinted windowpane started twirling faster than the billboard.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him, watching him glow brighter than the sun that was peeking into the room like an unexpected guest. It wasn’t that I was ungrateful to receive the truth. It was the way that kindness leaked out of my hands faster than grains of sands no matter how tightly I clutched it between my fingers.

“I was hoping we could be honest with each other.”

“But how do you know I can be trusted?”

“Do you want me not to trust you?”

“No.” I took another step forward and almost toppled over. I paused again and tried to turn to face him, “I need to understand why you do.”

“Uh, that hearing the heartbeat thing? It lets me know when people are lying to me.”

“What if I’m a really good liar?”

He quieted for a minute, finding a pan and lighting the gas hob, carefully placing a knob of butter in it. I took another two steps forward and then crouched on the stairs, stretching my legs as they cramped.

“You’ll get better at that, you just need some practice,” he threw my way as the eggs landed in a pan with a sizzle.

“You never answered my question.”

His lips twitched. I wanted to pry the answer from his head and tried to shape the buzzing into something extendable. The effort only made my head pound. The voices remained as jumbled as a yarn of wool. I was almost at the bottom of the stairs by the time he finally answered.

“When you woke up, when you really did, hallucinations aside, you…You wanted me and Claire to leave. You thought they would come for you and you could barely breathe but, you tried to _protect_ us.”

Matt moved to slice bread, giving me the space to ponder his answer. I replayed it in my head, trying to view myself from his angle, trying to see my fumbling attempts as acts of courage instead of what they truly were, endeavours to bleach my slate clean before it became more tainted with death that life.

I had to lean heavily on the sofa and on the table to finally reach the chair, but I eventually made it. The fever pounded against my temples and made everything around me hazy. I wanted to sleep. But I also couldn’t stop staring at Matt, looking for every way his senses compensated for his blindness, finally understanding. It was mesmerizing.

“Do you mind if I ask _you_ some questions now?” Matt tried to seem casual, friendly, professional as he dished out the eggs. Still, I felt myself curl up like a hedgehog, quills out, rejecting the intrusion.

“How about this: how about you promise not to lie and we agree that you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to?”

A compromise that would sharpen the needles but dull the sting as they pierced my skin. I nodded once as he settled a plate of scrambled eggs and buttered toast in front of me, heading back to the kitchen to fill two glasses with orange juice. He didn’t ask anything until he was seated across the table from me, and I had taken a bite of the eggs.

“Do you know your name?”

I hesitated, spikes out. It took two nibbles of toast for me to uncurl. I managed a quick nod.

“Any reason why you don’t want to tell me?”

The problem was not the reason why I didn’t want to tell him. The problem was that I didn’t have a reason _to_ tell him. I gulped down some eggs, feeling my throat tighten protectively against the answers I didn’t want to give.

“Why do you wear that?” I pointed to his red suit.

If he was surprised at my deflection, he didn’t show it.

“It’s…uh…armour. I used to wear simple black clothes, but Claire wasn’t too pleased when she kept having to patch me up…” I noticed he grimaced slightly when he said ‘Claire’ and suddenly her absence thickened like custard. I almost asked. Almost.

“And I’m assuming you wear something to protect your head too?” I let him nod before I went on, “Ok, so does that hide your face?” He nodded again, cocking his head to listen to…something.

“To stop people from recognising who you are?” he was smiling, I wasn’t sure why. He nodded again through a mouthful of eggs.

“Why?” I challenged him.

“Well. Most people wouldn’t take too kindly to the whole blind façade if they knew the truth. And it protects other sides of my life. And the people in them.”

_Exactly._

“I don’t have armour, or a mask. I just have a name.” The fact that I didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore was an entirely different issue.

He seemed to accept my answer and closed the topic with a vague: “Eat,” in my direction. I picked up my fork, not having realised that I had let it fall.

It took him longer to ask me his next question. He licked his lips and took a few breaths, made a few false-starts which he filled with more chewing.

“How do you know my name?” he asked eventually, staring resolutely at his plate.

I didn’t understand the question.

“Claire said it a few times an hour. Eventually I picked it up.”

“No. Before. While you were sleeping after that first night you…you said ‘Matthew’”

I remembered and froze, realizing too late that he would be able to read my body’s response better than any lie. I could still feel his name fluttering confidently out of my lips as if of its own accord while I explored his memories like they were mine.

“I probably heard it from Claire.”

It was a lie and we both knew it.

“Want to try again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me?”

“Both.”

He let that settle for a beat, then charged forward from another angle. I found answers stumbling out of my mouth before I could stop them, like I was deflecting punches.

“Do you know me?”

“No, I…”

“You what?”

“I know what I’ve learned while I’ve been here.”

“Do you know Claire?”

“No…”

“Yes?”

“You found _me_ , it wasn’t the other way around!”

“But you escaped.”

“Yes…?”

“Why.”

“What?”

“Why not go back?”

“Would _you_ want to go back there?”

“No, but the others didn’t seem too keen on being saved.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s…hard to explain.”

“Try.”

I clasped my lips, noticing for the first time that we were both leaning towards each other, and I wasn’t sure why. Matt waited while I tried to think of a way to explain that urge to return to our captors. Sometimes it still surged in me, even after all this time, so powerful it almost stunned me into submission.

“It’s like…an addiction. But different. Like we were hypnotised or something. Brainwashed?” I shook my head, willing better words to come, “while they had us, there was nothing else. It was just dark and _them_ and chemicals,” there was no way I could explain the darkness, how it seeped into our minds, into our veins. I didn’t even try, even when this blind man was probably the only one who could understand its depth.

“But they weren’t really there either. They were more like…voices. They’d say stuff, and at first, you wouldn’t listen, cos you’d be so busy,” _screaming_ , I thought and shuddered, remembering the desperation. Matt stayed very still, listening, “but then it would be so dark and so quiet, for so long. And the chemicals, they’d burn your insides, all the time and,” I found I was unable to stop, even as I watched Matt’s hand clench around the fork, knuckles white. I watched it glow like a ghost while words tripped out of my chest, loosening and squeezing my lungs at the same time, “their voices, their words, they’d soak into your brain like they were coming from your subconscious. And they’d tell you it was all for a purpose, that all this pain had a purpose, and it hurt so much that you’d just…want to believe it, you know? You had to believe it so that you’d survive.”

My voice dropped lower than a whisper but I still couldn’t stop, like gravity was pulling the truth straight from my lips.

“I used to think once we’d be freed, that we’d be _free_. But it’s like the burn is worse without the chemicals and sometimes you c-crave them and…and…all this time. All that pain. There had to be a purpose.”

My voice faltered and stopped and I found refuge in this quiet that was never quiet, tinted with the life of the city seeping through the gaps in the window. An unquiet that was a constant reminder that I was saved, that I was safe, even if just for now, like the warmth of the sun that climbed steadily through the windows.

Matt didn’t move for a long time, fists tight and lips tighter. When he did, his voice was carefully controlled, each move precise like a math equation. It felt like he had just pulled on a mask, like he was wearing a different person.

“Are you in pain now?”

I shrugged. There was nothing he could do to heal me. No point in dragging him to burn on the stake by my side.

“What can you tell me about the people who had you?”

It happened in the flash of anger when I thought of my captors. My veins seared and my mind became pliable. I let it flip like a coin, and it filled with shades of crimson and pewter and gold, shaped like a huddled body on a chair, while furniture echoed in and out of the image, made of sounds and tastes and smells. A fury unparalleled to any I had felt before waited for an answer, waited for blood, while every invisible noise screamed for attention.

It was an instant, a second, and then my mind snapped back like a rubber band and I found myself back where I belonged, clutching my temples and breathing harder than I had when I’d run up the stairs. I opened my eyes to find the roadmap of veins on the exposed bits of my wrists glistening blue in between the scars, and I hastened to pull my sleeves down to hide them.

Matt jumped out of his chair, sending his fork and the remnants of his plate flying across the table as he moved towards me. To protect me? To attack me? I wasn’t sure. I recoiled instinctively before his skin could touch me, knowing all too well what would happen if he did. He stilled like he understood, and sat back down, exaggerating his movements, head tilted my way in concentration. It felt like a warning not to try and sneak secrets past him.

“What was that?”

What _was_ that?! How had I done that?! Had I done that? I knew that was Matt’s mind, I knew it like I knew my own name. I tried to steady my breathing, to find an answer for Matt. Other answers would have to wait.

“Migraine,” I lied. He bit his lip and chewed my fib. Then he leaned forward again, all pretences gone.

“I can help you,” he said fervently.

“No. You can’t,” I let my hands fall from my head. The pain had dulled almost as fast as it had flared.

“I’ve fought them before.”

“You don’t understand, they are too many, they are everywhere.”

“With your help, I can take them down, one by one,” he paused while I shook my head but didn’t give me a chance to talk him out of it, “anything, anything you can remember will help.”

“It was dark, I never saw them,” I mumbled guiltily. I should have memorised their faces, their voices. I should have fought. But that hell had seemed so final. I’d forgotten how to hope.

“Something they said maybe? Did they mention names, places?”

I shook my head.

“How about the drugs they gave you? Did you ever see a name?”

That rang a bell, but it wasn’t because it made me think of the chemicals that had drenched our system. It was the mention of ‘drugs’. Little paper sachets almost glowing in the dark, their sweet floral smell filling my nostrils as the others sought reprieve from hell.

“There was…cocaine. I think it was cocaine…powdery, in paper sachets,” I told Matt.

“Did you ever see any symbol or name or emblem on it?”

“It was squiggly,” I could still feel it like it was etched against my fingers. The image of a red dragon flashed in my mind like a missing puzzle-piece, “a dragon. A red dragon, shaped like an ‘S’ or a…question mark maybe?”

“Could you draw it for me?”

I nodded. Matt didn’t bother to look for a pen and paper. He handed me his knife and napkin. I carved the figure in as best as I could with the tip of the blade, taking care not to puncture the thin fabric, and handed the napkin back to him. He ran two fingers over it as he read it.

“Madame Gao?” He murmured.

“Who?” I asked, intrigued.

“Nothing, forget about it. This was very helpful, thank you,” he stood, gathering dishes, “finish your breakfast, Claire will skin me alive if I let you go without eating again.”

He started moving around the room, gathering dirty dishes and pots and pans, filling the sink. I watched him move with a new energy, a new drive that scared me like I could see its outcome.

“You know who they are?” I asked him, awed and terrified and worried, because it was a small step from knowing them and _being_ them.

“No. Yes. Partly – I know stories, old legends mostly,” he shook his head, “most of them can’t be true.”

I begged to differ. I’d learned just how much truth there was in the impossible at my own expense. He seemed to read the tension rolling off my skin and put the plates down to face me.

“You can trust me, I mean you no harm,” his head tilted, and he tried to speak through a small smile, “you can come listen to my heart if you don’t believe me?”

The crazy thought of his heart belonging to Claire streaked through my mind along with the flickers of their kisses, an intrusion I still hadn’t managed to shake off. I blushed and shook my head. Matt leaned on the counter, dishes forgotten, as more questions fought their way out.

“Do you know why they want you back so badly?” his tone was gentle, like my answers would be a gift and not a requirement. I gave him what I could.

“They kept saying something about the ‘essence’. They needed our blood for it.”

“They have the others, aren’t they enough?”

“No. Our numbers were very specific, calculated. They needed all of us.”

He paused, shifted his weight, lowered his tone.

“Do you know why they took _you_ , specifically?”

“They wanted…I was…leverage,” the last word lodged it-self like a lump in my throat that made it hard to breathe.

“Against someone you cared about?”

I nodded, noticing how my hands were making the glass of orange juice shake. I set it down.

“Do you know what happened to them?”

He barely whispered it, but it was still too much for me to take. I resisted the urge to shut my ears with my hands, to run away from the room, to tear and scream at the fear that clawed at my insides at the thought. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. And I couldn’t know. I didn’t want to, when every alternative was more painful than the next.

I’d considered stealing a phone and dialling that number that I still knew by heart. I thought about the wait while it rang, about what it would mean if that someone picked-up. Would I put them in danger with my call? Had I already sentenced them to death when I ran away? And then what if they didn’t pick up at all?

Matt read the answer from the pain that was oozing out of my pores until I was almost crumpled against his chair. But he needed one more answer, like an extra log to fuel his rage.

“How long did they have you?” he choked out.

It wasn’t the first time that they had asked me this question. The first time, a few hours ago, the answer had been theirs and it had cracked me open like a fracture-line after an earthquake. This time, the answer was mine to give, and I gave it willingly, knowing it had lost its power of destruction over me.

“Two years, give or take.”

He swallowed thickly, then nodded once and set me free.

“Come on, time to get some rest.”

He was quiet as he cleaned the dishes and tidied the kitchen. He said nothing about the leftovers on my plate, seemingly more appeased with my answers than my ability to feed myself. I resolved to use whatever energy I had left for the trek to his bedroom.

I collapsed in my usual spot under the window of his bedroom, deciding to accept the bruises instead of the additional burn of muscles that would’ve been required for me to lower myself down more gently. I watched the early morning traffic flow underneath us and let its patterns soothe my mind, lulling my mind to the edge of sleep.

Matt appeared at the door, a quiet smile playing on his lips.

“Not a fan of silk sheets, huh?”

Claire and Matt had made it clear that they objected to my sleeping on the floor, and I myself couldn’t explain why I’d be more comfortable in a situation that reminded me of the cage instead of freedom. But softness now felt suffocating, like I would sink into it and it would swallow me whole, while the bareness of his floor, although uncomfortably jarring, felt like that steady pressure of a hand against a chest, reminding me to breathe.

“Sorry,” I shrugged my apology, and Matt grinned.

“Get some rest,” he said before disappearing from the door, ready to take his usual place on the couch. The room suddenly felt so empty that I shuddered.

“Matt?”

“Hm?” His head popped back through.

“You could…I mean,” the blush that coated my skin swallowed the rest of my words, but Matt still walked in, stroking the bed with the back of his hand like he understood.

Nightmares still plagued me in the bouts of rest that I managed to steal, and it was often the sound of Matt or Claire talking, or breathing or walking that roused me from my hell. Little reminders that I wasn’t alone anymore, like the mere presence of a ray of heat on my cheek, eased the horrors as extra air seeping in my lungs.

Matt didn’t say anything, instead disappeared out of the room for long enough that I wondered if he had just gone to sleep on the couch after all. But then he reappeared wearing a pair of grey sweats and a dark blue t-shirt and settled himself on the bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. I followed his lead and let my head rest on the wooden panelling, lying on my back to watch the world fade in and out of focus.

“Matt?” I could tell he was awake from his stillness on the sheets.

“Hm?”

“What…what do you miss the most?”

“About?” His mind was already elsewhere.

“About seeing.”

There was rustling of the sheets and his head appeared again, a strange longing on his face. He rubbed absentmindedly at his temples like it could jog his eyes back into functioning.

“The sky. I’d give anything to get a peak of the sky one more time.”

“Do you ever see it…in your dreams?”

His head disappeared again, but his voice reached me loud and clear from somewhere on his pillow.

“No. I don’t usually dream in colour.”

“Oh,” the sadness that filled me at the thought of a world without colour, a world that had been mine not so long ago, made me wish I hadn’t asked at all.

I let my eyes ease shut while I traced my veins absentmindedly, feeling a strange new sensation course through my body. It seemed I had only unlocked one of many locks, and maybe I had already lost the key. But for that one moment, it had been right there. That _power._

I left my eyes closed but didn’t sleep. I had work to do.


	11. The gift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Readers, apologies again, this time it was a (COVID-restricted and wore masks the whole time - I promise) wedding that delayed me. Thanks for your patience!

_Matt_

It was Claire, all Claire. Flitting in streams through my nostrils, staining the edge of my tongue, stuck in the back of my throat, encrusted between each cell in my body. Any shift of air in my hair released another cloud of her. The walls in every room sang her name, she was in my fridge and under the tiles in my bathroom. She was even here, in these bed sheets. But it was the fact that she wasn’t that turned my lungs to stone.

The girl lay huddled on the floor and had gone quiet a while ago, but her calculated breathing didn’t fool me for a second. I resolved to wait here until she was asleep. And then…and then I didn’t know. I just had to get out.

My eyes itched from the tiredness and I let them close, let them _rest_ , like they needed rest from doing nothing all the time. I tried to slow my breathing, slow that electricity that was crawling under my skin, so that I could still, so that the girl would drift to sleep. Stick had taught me how, how to empty my mind and make everything I was the air that was filling my chest. And that was seeping out. Focusing on the movement in my belly. Feeling each heartbeat…

.

I woke with a jolt with my hand outstretched in front of me, confused for a second as to why I couldn’t _see_. That sky had seemed so _real_ , it had been right there, closer than this darkness that coated my irises. I wiped my eyes like I could bring it back, make the world that blue again and was surprised to find my face wet from tears.

_Pussy_ , spat the Stick in my head. The girl shifted on the floor, her heart beating too hard for a person that had been asleep, her scent filled with adrenaline and that something else, that chemical trace again. It tasted bitter on my tongue.

I let my senses branch out, taking stock of our whereabouts while my pulse slowed. Most tenants were still out and from the sound of the tv blaring two floors below, it seemed like it was early afternoon. Wow, I had slept for hours. I felt even more restless. The roof was quiet, so were the ones around us, only a few stray pigeons and that vagrant cat, stomach growling at their sight.

And then there it was again, like it had been waiting in between each of my tensing tendons, the ghost of Claire’s memory. It filled my lungs with lead and my fingers convulsed with handfuls of silk sheets, like they could pull her out of thin air. She wouldn’t be back for hours. If she’d be back at all. I couldn’t wait out that ‘if’ in these walls, not when they were all her, this place was all her.

I stood too quickly for my senses to adjust and stumbled blindly the first few steps out of the room. The girl made a faux ‘just waking up’ sound that I didn’t bother to acknowledge. I crawled into the suit, stubbornly ignoring how now that was all Claire too, and was halfway up the stairs before the girl croaked my name. Matt. Just that. And it wasn’t the tone of her voice that stopped me, but the beat of her pulse behind it, that fear of abandonment that I knew so well, that was wearing me better than the suit and made me want to shed my skin.

_I know_ , I wanted to say.

“I’ll be right back,” I threw her way, “stay, uh, stay inside.”

Stay _safe_ , until I can find the will to keep you safe myself.

Something crumpled in my wake, and I wasn’t sure if it was me, or her. I didn’t linger long enough to check.

The roof wasn’t enough, the air was too dense, the sun felt wrong. I was running before I’d taken my first full breath, chasing the cooler currents, knowing they would hide me in the shade of the day. Daredevil wasn’t supposed to be roaming at this time. Part of me cared. Part of me didn’t care enough.

It felt good to run, to fly between rooftops. I let my muscles drive me forward, my senses guiding me like second nature. I didn’t have to think. I didn’t want to think. The city was my playground, mine for the taking. The city was there for me, the only constant I could count on, like that burn in my muscles. _That_ , I knew how to wield. Pain I could wield. The rest…I ran faster, pushed myself harder, until the fire in my lungs was the only thing that ached in my chest, and the devil was set free.

.

_Blue_

It hurt. It hurt even worse this time, that I had done it on purpose. I wasn’t sure I could unglue myself from the floor. My hands were shaking, and the fire was blazing everywhere. Beads of perspiration were rolling down my temples, making errant curls stick to my forehead. It took all that I had not to writhe in pain, to even out my breathing. Because he was awake now, he would _know_.

I had chosen the image carefully. I wanted it to be a gift, not an intrusion. It had to be the most perfect sky, blue and cloudless and happy, that was key. The memory had to be happy.

It had taken me hours to figure out how. Lots of empty hours with me straining nothing at all, wasting air on sheer will-power. And I had to be still, so he wouldn’t wake before I’d figured this out. I didn’t think I’d ever spent so much time shushing my heartbeat.

It had been like looking for a needle in a haystack at first, sorting through the strands one by one, carefully placing the wrong ones to one side only to find them scattered back onto the pile with the first gust of wind. Even that had felt unnatural, like leaning against a stab wound, prying it gently open with a blade. I’d clenched my fists and bit my tongue not to make a sound, made sure my breath came out in even gusts.

I’d stumbled on him almost by mistake, deciding to leap into the fire to feel its warmth but not the burn. His mind was vulnerable in his sleep, pliable, open. Small flickers of light flitted in and out of a dreamless sleep, senseless and jumbled with the muted onslaught of stimuli attacking him from the outside. I pushed the image out of my head, my hands splayed on the floor like it could connect us more directly, pushed until the weight of a thought, heavy as a boulder, travelled the short distance that separated our minds. Two minds, both in my head, mine to shape and explore and control. I made them both light up with that one image, my favorite sky, blue and perfect, the feel of summer, the rays of a midday sun swaying gently against my skin and that irrational happiness that comes from seeing the world smile. I couldn’t hold it for long, a few seconds at best, the chemicals burning new trails in and out of my veins, heart struggling to keep up with the pain, skin shimmering bluer than the sky. I watched Matt’s head still in wonder, his hand inch forward into the void, fingers greedily searching to feel the view that he’d been missing the most.

My gift to the man who couldn’t see.

.

_Matt_

It wasn’t a solid plan. It wasn’t even a plan. More of an afterthought, a distraction. I needed to find the Hand, stop them before Hell’s Kitchen became deign of its name. And so far this was my only lead. Unless…No, no. Going to Stick was not an option. It would be like admitting that his made-up war was real. I couldn’t give in to the old man’s crazy cogitations. No.

Madame Gao’s abandoned warehouse was just that: abandoned. Soot and dirt coated the insides of my airways all the way to the edges of my lungs until I felt like I was releasing a cloud of dust and smoke with every breath. I could still taste the sweet floral tinge of cocaine on the tip of my tongue, but the rest was buried under the overwhelming bitterness of the fire that ravaged this place. The remnants of the building were so quiet that I had to stomp my feet loudly as I walked to get a gauge of the space. I didn’t bother to draw my fingers on the rubble: any trail was long gone, clues burned to ash. Just standing here made me feel like I was on the edge of that pit of despair from the night I found her. I shuddered and turned to leave.

A couple of well-calculated leaps were enough to spring me onto the rooftops once again. I landed lightly on the balls of my feet and crouched in the freezing air, trying to rid my lungs from the layer of smoke. I felt a strange and savage pleasure when I realized I was not able to smell Claire on me anymore. Maybe that’s all I had really wanted from this place.

I shook myself off, from the dirt, from my thoughts, and decided to head home. I was only a couple of blocks down when the wind changed course and blew a familiar scent in my face. Except it couldn’t be. The heavy tang of artillery, mixed with sweet leather, sweat and adrenaline irked its way to me in bouts closer than bullets. I found myself listening for the scrape of an index finger on a loaded trigger before I had the sense to stop myself, searching for that booming voice filled with threats and wisdom. But it couldn’t be. Frank wouldn’t be lingering in the city after escaping from jail.

I stopped anyways, perched on the edge and let my senses branch out. The ensuing ambush from the city was overwhelming, but I knew how to tame it. I filtered through the noise and breathed deep, letting the air fan my tongue on its way in. All I got back was the hustle and bustle of just another day in Hell’s Kitchen. If Frank had been here, he was out of my reach now.

I found myself strangely disappointed as I trudged home.

_._

_Blue_

Matt found me huddled on the top of his stairs, and by his lack of surprise I assumed that he had used his senses to sneak a peek into the room. He huffed down next to me after letting the door to the roof slam closed. He smelled faintly like charcoal and there were bits of soot layered like salt and pepper on his skin. The heat from his exertion radiated the freezing November air through the thin layers of my clothes and made me shiver.

“How many did you manage?” He asked, removing his mask and rotating it in his hands.

“Three,” I lied. Ok, technically, I had only managed to go up and down this short flight of stairs twice, and then up once more, so maybe it was more of a two and a half. That was when my legs locked and gave up. I’d been sitting up here ever since, contemplating exactly how much it would hurt to just throw myself down the stairs versus spending the night on this step.

“That’s good,” he nodded seriously. We sat in silence for a while, like that wasn’t weird at all.

“You stuck?” he said eventually.

“No.”

Rolling down the stairs was becoming more appealing every second. The step above me was digging uncomfortably into my back and the cold was numbing everything that wasn’t already not responding.

“A little,” I admitted through gritted teeth.

“I can carry you,” he offered gently. He made no move towards me and maybe that’s what stopped me from flinging myself over the bannister.

“You don’t like to be touched,” his tone was matter of fact, he wasn’t questioning it, “I can get a blanket or something and put that in between us if it helps?”

I felt like such a prat. But how could I explain that I was a thief? That every contact would allow me to steal thoughts that weren’t mine?

“No, it’s ok,” I sighed and lifted my arms, “let’s do this.”

He came in slowly, placed himself so that one of my arms was automatically behind his neck and I glimpsed the pale flesh of his neck as he swallowed. He lifted me in a swift move that didn’t even change his breathing pattern, carefully cradling me against his chest with one arm under my knees and the other under my armpit. I was barely jostled as he moved confidently down the stairs, secure in the layer of clothing that prevented any skin-to-skin contact.

He placed me carefully on the couch and crouched in front of me while I released a shuddering breath I didn’t realize I was holding. My forearm was perched casually on his shoulder, with the tips of my fingers so precariously close to the flesh of his neck. Curiosity made my fingertips twitch with desire while Matt tilted his head to listen to the thundering beat of my heart as I considered the possibility. I inched them closer until the pads of my index finger brushed featherlight against the small hairs at the base of his skull.

I felt Matt freeze as his memory filled me up. It was the usual blend of darkness and shades of reds that I attributed to Matt’s blindness. But this time it was bright, like facing the sun with your eyes closed, letting it burn a hole right through your eyelids. There was shyness and indecision and hope, so much hope, dripping from each words that was simultaneously bouncing in Matt’s chest and off each one of the walls until Matt could almost see the edges of the room: “Me and you, Maverick and Goose, no secrets.”

I found myself smiling faintly when my fingers drifted away from Matt. His worried expression hit me like a slap.

“What was that?” His head tilted this way and that. I could feel the tension in his shoulders under my arm.

I was breathing hard, too hard. My veins flared and sang but I couldn’t focus on them, I was still too full of warmth from that instant of Matt’s life. And I wanted more.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, standing up. My arm fell back onto my lap as I felt the warm trail of wetness leak down my nose and onto my lips. He came back with a wet towel that he placed carefully under my nose to stench the flow.

“Pinch your nose, here,” he demonstrated by pinching the bridge of his nose. I obeyed, trying to calm the thunder in my chest. He could hear it, I knew he could. His head tilted again, then he said: “No, higher,” and his hand brushed mine to adjust the angle on my nose. It was just a second, and even then, the world became saturated with the sound of rain and a voice colored Matt’s lips as it whispered an eager ‘yes’ against his.

Droplets of sweat pooled at my temples as I slumped against the back of the couch. Matt edged forward to keep the towel under my nose. My skin was catching fire, the burn that circulated through me was so hot. His worried frown swirled dizzily in front of my face.

“What was that?” He asked again, more urgently. My eyelids drooped in exhaustion.

“When I touch you,” he halted, listening harder.

“What?” I slurred, tongue as heavy as each one of my limbs.

“You…” His fingers crept towards me, almost whispered against the bare skin on my cheek and I couldn’t help that weight of longing, of _need_ , that coursed through me at the thought of snatching another glimpse of his life. I leaned forward towards his touch, aching to close the distance.

Matt’s head suddenly jerked away and I think I saw him pale before a faint blush crept steadily to his cheeks. I lifted a hand to hold the towel in place when he almost let it slip from his fingers. He stood and pulled at the crook of his suit, like he wanted to adjust a tie that wasn’t there. Then he took half a step towards the stairs, one towards the corridor and two steps back towards the bedroom before a key scraped in the lock and confident footsteps filled the apartment.

.

_Claire_

Matt looked so much like a deer in the headlights that I automatically scanned the room for any evidence of mischief. Still, just seeing him made my heart squeeze in my chest. And maybe that’s what made him unfreeze from his ‘fight or flight’ pose. He murmured my name in greeting so softly that I wished I had super senses to catch each timbre as it left his lips. His features softened with every step I took, that thick armor of his melting off his stance. I wondered if his senses were sharp enough to hear the butterflies flutter around my insides. I was afraid to open my mouth in case I let them out.

I found the girl semi-passed out on the couch, a bloody towel held under her nose, a thin layer of sweat coating her skin. The blood drew a sharp contrast against the greenish pallor of her skin. She looked like she was on the verge of collapse or even just throwing up, breathing so hard like she’d just come back from a jog around the block. And yet her eyes were alert, even when hidden behind her heavy lids, bouncing swiftly between me and Matt like she was watching a particularly intriguing tennis match.

“Ok, what happened,” I sighed, crouching in front of her. Matt gave a pointed shrug and frowned in her direction, like he was annoyed at her for something. The girl just locked her eyes on me and gave me a knowing smile that made me blush to the tips of my hair. Had Matt told her? I gave her a sharp look and moved nonchalantly to get her an ice-pack. I wrapped it haphazardly in a cloth that was on the kitchen and placed it gently on her nose, replacing her slender fingers that were pinching the skin to stench the flow.

“So, I leave you two alone for two seconds and what? You set yourselves on fire and enter a boxing match?”

Matt shifted uncomfortably, then brushed some soot off his face. I sighed. I wanted to trace the planes of his face, to kiss the dunes and the valleys, taste the circles under his eyes and let them tell me all their secrets.

“Did you two at least have something to eat?”

“Yeah,” said Matt in a low tone that made him clear his voice before he continued, “yeah, we had breakfast.” The girl nodded behind the icepack and kitchen towel.

“Right, you do realize that it’s evening now, right? There’s this thing that people do, have three meals a day?”

“Crazy, I know,” I added when the girl hid her eyes behind the icepack and Matt’s posture became so defensive that I expected horns to sprout from his head.

“I was getting around to it. I just got back,” he snapped.

“You left?!” I didn’t mean for it to sound so accusing, but I felt that leaving the girl unprotected with a potential ninja army/zombie apocalypse searching for her all over the city was a little on the risky side.

“Not for long,” he said, standing up to his full height.

“They don’t need long to take her away, you know that,” I shivered at the memory, the fighting, the blood, the flying out of a window, “what if something had happened?”

“It didn’t, she is fine.”

“She doesn’t look _fine_ to me.”

“Um,” said the girl in a small voice, “I’m just going to…” and she slithered towards the bedroom, legs stiffer than a robot, looking a little like a penguin marching to safety. Part of me wished I could follow her. The other part wanted to tear Matt to pieces.

“And where did you go? You look like you put out a forest fire with your hands.”

“I went to check out a lead.”

“Oh sure, go to them, pick a fight, that will help.”

“Claire, I can’t let them tear Hell’s Kitchen apart.”

“You can Matt, you don’t have to do this.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No, you won’t. You’ve seen what they can do. Look at that girl in there! Look at what they’ve done to her! You can’t take _them_ on Matt. Last time you were completely outnumbered.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“They’ll kill you Matt! They’ll kill you.”

“If it makes Hell’s Kitchen a better place, then it’s a risk worth taking.”

“And what about the rest of us? What are we meant to do when you die?”

What was I meant to do? Live in the half story that he left behind?

“It’ll be ok,” he mumbled, and it looked like even he didn’t believe it. Not completely.

Fists clenched and breath heavy, he was a kid in a Halloween costume who wanted to believe it was real. I fought the urge to fight more, to scream some sense into him. This was an argument that was never ending, replaying in a loop, and the wiser, less furious part of me was telling me that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t even what we were really mad about.

I had come here for a purpose, I had come here for one thing. I took a deep breath and looked away from that face that drew me in, from that grounding stare of a man that was trying to pull himself away, shut himself off before he could fall. He was almost leaning towards me, the space between us heavy, thick. I couldn’t reign-in my pulse as it beat a rhythm of betrayal. My pulse knew what it wanted, what _I_ wanted, and chased it harder and faster as it drummed.

“Matt, I…” I started, but a knock on the door jammed the rest of my sentence in my throat.

“Foggy?!” The name tumbled out of Matt’s jaw as it went slack.

Matt was startled, shocked, surprised. It was clear in his voice, in his solid posture. I wondered what would make him focus so completely that he’d miss out on hearing someone approach, on hearing his best friend approach. _Matt_ , who could smell cologne from three floors down with a concussion.

As I watched him turn and head down the corridor towards the door, I realized he had been concentrating on me. Only on me. Entirely on me. And I didn’t know what that meant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Readers, wonderful readers, if you are still here, consider giving me a nudge. The stats page on here doesn't really tell me how many of you made it this far. You don't have to review anything if you don't want to, just say 'hi', tell me how your day went, admit you are using this fic to line your cat's litter box. We write for ourselves, of course, but it gets pretty lonely to talk to a wall the whole time. I'd love to hear what you think of it so far!
> 
> Either way, thanks for sticking with this.


	12. Finding your name

_Foggy_

_Franklin Nelson, you are going to do it. You are going to walk up those stupid stairs (Jesus fucking Christ, how many stairs!) and you are going to tell him. You are, you are, you are._

I repeated it like a mantra, once for each step. By the second landing I worried that I wouldn’t have enough breath left to speak when I reached his door.

_Come on Foggy. You can do this. Dig deep. Find your primal instinct. These are just stairs. You are a man, with the same muscles that make Matt backflip his way onto roofs. Ha! Maybe._

By the third landing I was almost bent in two and wheezing. I prayed that Matt was out so that he wouldn’t be able to witness this humiliation. I remembered that I didn’t believe in God half-way through the next flight of stairs.

I basically crawled up to the fourth landing. When a neighbor passed me on the stairs, I pretended I was tying my shoelaces, not collapsing from a probable heart-attack. I listened for signs of her calling 911 until she was safely out of the door.

I reached his door and almost crumpled from nerves. My lungs ached like I was breathing water instead of air and my heart couldn’t decide whether it wanted to beat faster from what I was about to do or from climbing mount Everest here. Either way, it was so loud that maybe I wouldn’t even have to knock.

_Ok Foggy, you can do this. Just knock on that ruddy door, tell him and then you can move on with your life._

Easier said than done. It took me ten minutes to raise my arm high enough, another five to move it close to the wooden door. The sound of my knuckles rapping three times startled me, surprised at my own bravery. I waited for a response. I hoped he wouldn’t open the door. I hoped he would.

Matt took an inordinate amount of time to come to the door. Enough time to make me think that he was out, then worry he was too injured to respond. My heart pumped twice as fast as the footsteps that I could hear approaching. I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin and then…there he was.

I couldn’t speak for a second, the sight of him bubbling so many emotions that I didn’t know which one to lean into first. I didn’t know what I had expected, that he’d morphed into a different person over the course of a few weeks? Instead he was still Matt, just Matt, so familiar with that tousled hair and glass-less stare…except this Matt was clearly uncomfortable.

“Foggy,” he said in way of greeting. Not ‘Hi Foggy’, not ‘hey buddy’ or ‘Fogs’. Foggy. Might as well have called me Franklin, tore my heart out of my chest and stomped on it.

Right. Not friends anymore. Deep breath.

“Can we talk?”

“Uh, now is not really a good time.”

“When is it ever a good time with you, Matt?”

I couldn’t keep the annoyance out of my voice as I pushed past him, forced him to take a step back to let me in. I noticed that he was covered in bits of soot and was wearing his daredevil costume. It wasn’t even dark out. Did he sleep in that thing now? The old Foggy wanted to worry and ask. The new Foggy sucker-punched the old Foggy in the gut and reminded him that Matt was none of his business. We weren’t best friends anymore. Hell, we weren’t even friends. This was just a courtesy former law partners visit. That was all. I didn’t miss Matt. I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t.

I didn’t move further in than a couple of steps into the corridor. I didn’t need Matt to tell me just how unwelcome I was when his stance rolled out waves of ‘unwanted, unwanted, unwanted’ off his skin. Fine by me, I didn’t want to be here either. I turned to face him and watched him cross his arms over his chest protectively. Like I could hurt him. Like he _cared_.

“Hey Foggy!” cried a cheery voice behind me. I jumped and turned so quickly I would’ve made a ballerina proud. I _knew_ that voice.

“Claire?!”

Sure enough, Claire’s head bobbed into view from the living room, a cheery smile splitting her face into the colors of a rainbow. I couldn’t help but smile right back. Stupid hot girls. How did Matt always get them to buzz around him like that?!

“What the heck are you doing here?” I asked her as I walked towards the living room. Matt followed me silently, clearly annoyed. I didn’t care.

“Oh, you know, this and that,” Claire replied, in her usual answer but give no information way that made her such a perfect fit for Matt. I wondered if they ever managed to say anything in their conversations, or if they just deflected questions until one of them stop asking them. Maybe all they did was have sex. God, my life _sucked_.

“Am I interrupting something?

“Yes,” said Matt.

“No,” said Claire at the exact same time.

“Right,” I muttered, as they glared at each other. Well, Claire glared murder and thunder while Matt frowned somewhere in her direction. Don’t get me wrong, their faces were equally terrifying. I just really didn’t have time for this.

Just then I heard a shuffling from the bedroom. I’m not sure what I expected. Probably another equally hot girl draped in silk sheets coming to check on where the rest of her threesome had disappeared to? I would probably had been less shocked.

Oh, it was a girl all right. Except she looked more dead than alive, like a frigging corpse. She stumbled into the room and froze solid when she saw me, uttering a single: “oh!” of shock.

What. The. Fuck.

I wanted to ask Matt if she was part of his new ninja entourage, but I couldn’t stop staring.

She had one of those faces that kept age veiled like a secret. Big brown eyes watched me in concern, half-hidden by untidy curls that ran the length of her shoulders in waves and pirouettes. Her face was gaunt, stretched, bones jutting out under the thin fabric of her clothes and she moved like she had forgotten how. She looked like she was wearing a circus tent, carefully and strategically pinned to keep it in place with bits of string and too big belts. On closer inspection, I realized they were probably Matt’s clothes. I’d never seen them look so big on someone. She kept nervously pulling her sleeves down all the way to her hands, and I caught a glimpse of scars crisscrossed like tree roots on her wrists. The sight of her made my heart ache.

Matt broke the silence first, probably tasting the tension or reading my mind or whatever he could do with his stupid senses.

“She’s…um. I’m helping look after her for father Lantom. She’s a little old for the orphanage and well…is recovering from…from…”

“From?” I asked him. I’d never seen Matt so disheveled. He was usually more confident. Even in his lies.

“She is a recovering drug addict,” finished Claire promptly. Matt nodded enthusiastically. The girl looked like her eyes were about to pop out of their sockets in outrage, but she didn’t deny it. I guessed that explained the scars.

“Franklin Nelson,” I told her, stepping forward to offer her my hand, “but you can call me Foggy. Everyone else does.”

I gave her a kind smile but she still jumped back like I had pulled out a gun, stared at my hand like it was poisonous and uttered an uncertain, “Foggy” in response. Then her eyes went back to running the worn circuit from Matt, to Claire, to my hand, and back. I put both hands in my pockets.

“So uh…you got a name?”

She shrugged, the most non-comital move in the world, and then went back to shrinking into herself like she wished the floor would open-up and swallow her whole.

“No name huh?” Weird. “Sure, I can work with that.”

Matt looked like he wanted to object, even raised half an arm in my direction, then let it drop back to his side. Claire smiled encouragingly and crossed her arms as she fell into the nearest chair. The girl struggled to meet my eyes and avert them at the same time. I took it all as a resounding yes.

“Challenge accepted! By the end of the evening, you shall be named by none other than yours truly, and I am a genius at finding people’s names, if I may say so myself.”

“Sure,” Matt huffed, “who wouldn’t want to be called ‘Foggy’?”

“Matthew Michael Murdock, are you saying you have a problem with my naming prowess?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare,” Matt laughed. The sound brought me back to the smell of sweaty dorms and cheap beer and textbooks rustling in the night. I wished I could bottle it up.

“Good,” I told Matt, “you wouldn’t want to mess with these,” I flexed a bicep close to his face and Claire laughed when Matt lifted two palms in defeat. The girl just stared at us wide-eyed like she had landed in a bad sitcom and wasn’t sure exactly how.

“So, where you from?” I asked her, leaning on the counter.

“You ask a lot of questions,” she blurted out in a very _are you for real_ tone. Girl, you have no idea.

“Sorry, force of habit. Side-effect of lawyering.”

“Lawyers, huh?” she looked from me to Matt and I could almost hear the pin drop in her head.

“Guilty!” I grinned.

“My dad was a -,” she stopped like she’d been hit by a brick wall and I found myself leaning forward and clutching at thin air like I wanted to remove it. She shook her head and bit her lip, so hard it made my lips tingle. If pain had a face, well. I was staring right at it. Not good. Not good Nelson.

“So how about some dinner, huh? I’m starving,” I moved to the fridge and was literally grasping at straws. I knew I had to replace the image of that girl from my head before I left. I was going to draw a smile out of that carcass of a leftover person if I had to chisel it in myself.

“What’ve we got…” I rummaged behind the beers, “eggs, spinach, peppers, euch Murdock, are you a girl or something. What the heck is this?” I pulled out a vegetable that I had only seen in dirty emojis.

“It’s an eggplant, Foggy,” Matt was using his condescending ‘you should probably eat more of these’ tone. Nope, no thank you.

“Right, whatever,” I tossed it back in, “tomatoes…some kind of cheese or tofu or something. Seriously?! You’re like a middle-aged divorcee, buddy. I need to teach you how to _eat_. Still so much to learn my young padowan.”

There were two little huffs of air, like a _giggle_ , and the room quieted and stilled as our eyes screeched to a halt on the girl. It was almost there on her lips, that smile, but her eyes were filled with mirth, with _life_ , and it was raining fucking sunshine.

“Oh, so you think this is funny? Ok. Show us what you got,” I stepped aside and gestured to the fridge, arms wide. Her eyes blazed, actually blazed and her eyebrow quirked.

“Step aside, _Foggy_ ,” she said my name like she was giving me an option to change it, “out of my kitchen.”

“As you wish, my lady,” I bowed and took three beers on my way to the couch.

.

It took fucking _ages_. And _of course_ the girl had to go for the eggplant. Like people actually ate that. Ugh. I was going to have to stop for takeout on my way back.

I sat with Matt and Claire, making awkward chit-chat that was just as mismatched as the furniture. We downed probably too many beers while I tried not to stare at that spot in the ground that had been covered in a pool of blood and my best friend barely a year ago. But even that wasn’t as valiant as the efforts we made to avoid the herd of elephants that were casually stampeding around the room.

My gut jumped to my throat when I saw the girl pick up the first knife, huge and menacing in her trembling fingers, but she just went on to chop the vegetables like a fucking pro, and I almost asked her if she was a chef or something. And I had to admit it kinda smelled good, whatever she was making.

She went all out, I had to give her that. Set the table, found candles, plates, napkins. Even Matt looked surprised he had all those _homey normal_ things in his house, let alone on his table. She wiped the kitchen counters clean, washed the chopping boards and knives, replaced the unused ingredients in the exact same place where she’d found them. She looked exhausted, barely on her feet, but the fire in her eyes, that fire blazing with life and determination, was contagious in its heat. It scorched, from my irises down to my toes, every time I dared to lock her eyes with mine.

When the food was finally ready (something that looked a lot like a lasagna but clearly wasn’t, still steaming and bubbling at the sides, and fucking fresh bread, crackling and crusty and soft at the center), I had to purse my lips not to drool. She stared at it all dispiritedly, then at her bony arms, frowning like she was trying to solve a complex math equation and it didn’t take me long to figure out which: arm force / distance to table = dinner on the floor. I took over carrying the food before she had time to do something stupid. Who knew, maybe Matt’s stupid was catching.

We sat and passed on startled glances across the table (well, most of us did. Matt was probably trying to direct the ‘growling stomach symphony’), frankly a little shocked at the feast she had created. From vegetables no less. Who knew. The girl jolted us into motion with her annoyed, ‘well…eat!’.

I moaned, actual porn-movie moan, as the flavors tantalized my taste-buds. It was the most perfect explosion of flavor, balanced like a trapeze, all mopped-up with crusty fresh bread with a still-steaming crumb.

“Oh dear _God_ ,” I groaned, “I need to find you a name right now because I need to propose to you this is so good.”

I took another bite and Matt actually blew out an indignant ‘Foggy!’ at the inappropriate noise that escaped my lips. But I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. Not when my eyes were so full of her.

I watched it break through the clouds like the most perfect summer sky, sunny and blue, so blue that you needed to look twice to check it was really there. The girl smiled, thirty-two shiny choppers and blushing lips and those eyes that could melt glaciers.

“Blue!” I yelled triumphantly.

Claire jumped. The girl stared. Matt moved a grubby paw to my face to check for a stroke.

“That’s it! I got it!” I told them, and I stood to make my point, waving a fork like a victory flag, “from now on, you shall be known as Blue,” and I completed my declaration with a general wave of a cross, like a benediction that sent bits of food flying everywhere and probably offended Matt to the core. Sorry Matt.

“Blue,” the girl swirled the name in her mouth like she was trying it on.

“I like it,” said Claire with a smirk. Matt nodded.

The girl grinned, she fucking _grinned_. And it was so beautiful that I couldn’t get enough. She was a person again.

Mission accomplished.

.

_Matt_

Foggy…I’d missed him like an ache in my bones.

There was so much light when he was around. The change in the girl, in Blue, stunned me. She almost glowed under his scrutiny, she blossomed, she remembered to be alive.

We watched her smile in astonished silence and I thanked God for Foggy, because he was swift to distract her from this miracle, launching into completely unpredictable marriage proposals and making her rate them out of ten. Claire joined in when she could get a breath in, bent over double from laughter, little mouthfuls of food suddenly hazardous when her throat was so full of happiness that she couldn’t swallow.

I ate, and drank, and smiled more than I had in a long time. I laughed sometimes too. Sometimes, I almost choked. I found my hand on Foggy’s shoulder just to feel him there. I didn’t think of the Hand, or the fear, or the war a single time. I fell for Claire a little, every time she smiled. And the girl…Blue. I found I had a smile just for her.

.

_Foggy_

Blue’s personality was spilling out all at once, tiny little details for us to sponge up, things that we didn’t know were even missing, but now were so part of her that I hoped they wouldn’t leave again. Just the way she laughed was enough to still my heart in my chest. And it’s not like I hadn’t made a girl laugh before, I mean, making girls laugh was probably the only weapon in my arsenal. Well, that and my…not the point. Blue was hypnotic in her movements, and I found myself counting the many different types of laughter that she had. There were the ones that bubbled to her lips slow and quiet and died away just as fast. Others that were no more than a stronger sigh through a wide smile. And then the bent over double kind, that was sobs. Sobs of laughter. She always hid the joy behind her hand, shaking her head to what, I didn’t know. That laughter ran like a torrent, with tears, and always ended in silent spasms that would’ve worried us if they hadn’t been so contagious. That laughter…it was already my favorite kind.

There were physical things too, little jewels scattered on her skin. Like that dimple on the one side of her face when she smiled wide enough. I only saw it the one time. And then how her lips curved downwards instead of up when she smiled shy. It made it hard not to stare.

And then there were the mannerisms, the way she spoke when she wasn’t so afraid. I wondered where she picked up each one, was it from a friend, was it from her mother. Did they miss her now. Were they still alive.

It felt strange to say goodbye. I wasn’t sure if I still was the same person who had walked into the threshold. I offered her my hand once again, hoping she had changed a little too. She stared at it for a long moment, as if she was bracing herself for God knows what, and then surprised us all when she enveloped me in a tight hug. I tried not to squeeze her too close, or to touch her at all, really. Her brittle bones jutted out under my palms and I was afraid she would crumble under my touch.

She had to stop when blood started spouting from her nose. Claire took her away before I even had a chance to be concerned, or squeamish, or even useful. I noticed that her hands had been on my neck only when she took them away, a ghost of her heat left to burn on my skin. She disappeared in the bathroom with a quick wave of her hand, her fingertips bloody. Matt had to take me by the elbow to walk me out of the front door, closing it behind us.

“That girl, Blue?” I told him. My eyes were still full of that last image, the blood glowing, like it was engraved into my brain, a permanent photograph. I scrubbed my eyes to wash it away, surprised to find my eyes wet. I wondered if Matt would miss the trace of salt on my fingers.

I wanted to ask who she really was, but the words never found my lips. I just hoped she would be ok, really. That’s all.

“Yeah…she. She is something else,” Matt said with that head tilt of his, the one where you know that he isn’t really talking to you as much as he is to your internal organs. I hope my guts weren’t being embarrassingly loud.

We stood in silence, Matt slowly folding back into himself. Truce was over, the ladies had left us to our metaphorical cigars and scotch. I found my courage waning once more, a part of me endlessly asking why things couldn’t just be simple when trying to befriend Matt Murdock. I just wanted him to be happy, that was it. Did he know that?

“You and Claire?” I asked him to buy time, and also because come on, Matt and Claire? The lucky sod.

Matt shook his head, “it’s complicated.”

What had I expected. This was Matt, after all.

“When is it not with you, huh, buddy? She’s a great girl, Matt.”

“I know…”

Did he? Did he really?

“And I know it’s none of my business but,” I continued, “as a former best friend to his blind kick-ass lawyer partner…the way she looks at you? It’s not so complicated.”

Come to bed eyes, that was the only way I could describe it. If a girl had given me that look, I would’ve been off my ass and into her faster than you could say – Matt shifted. Right. Not what I was here for.

I dithered, just like I knew I would, mulling my news in my head, phrasing and rephrasing them. Truth be told, I was a little stung that Matt hadn’t corrected me when I called him my ‘former’ best friend.

“You want to say something,” he said, and I guessed my breathing had changed or something. 

“You really need to stop showing off, man, you know that, right?” Or maybe just reserve it for the ladies. Not that he needed that advantage too…Leave something for the rest of us, buddy.

“Just say what you need to say.”

Right. I took a deep breath, “I got a job Matt. I got offered a job.”

Matt didn’t even hesitate: “That’s great man.”

It stung. I went on, unable to contain myself now that I had started, feeling this bizarre need to justify myself, to explain, to need his permission, his approval, even.

“Yeah. Turns out they were impressed with how I handled the punisher case…I guess I have you to thank for that. If you hadn’t bailed, I guess I would never have had to…well. Try.”

And I had hated every second of it, of lawyering without Matt. But it was nice to be acknowledged, just one time. It was nice to be good at something, by myself.

“Foggy, it’s always been all you. Nelson and Murdock…you were the heart of it.”

I shrugged, I didn’t even narrate it, because Matt said those things, did those things, when it was all him, his idea, his miracle, his rinky-dink firm.

“So it’s really over, huh? Nelson and Murdock?”

“Yeah…yeah, I guess so,” he didn’t look sad or happy, just tired. I wondered once more about all the little bits of his life that he kept from me, about Claire and Blue waiting inside. For what? I wasn’t sure.

“You know, when I came here to tell you that I got a new job, part of me…part of me was hoping you’d talk me out of it,” I wasn’t sure what made me say it, to his face. Maybe I finally had nothing left to lose. Maybe I just really wanted my best friend back.

“Sometimes I hope I will too,” he admitted, giving me one of his lopsided grins that made him look so much like a dork. My heart clenched in my chest, actual heart attack ache. When Matt didn’t make a move to save me, I knew I was going to survive.

“Take care of yourself Matt. I hope that whatever this is…I hope you’ll sort it out.”

I held out my hand for him to shake, formal, business-like, foreign. Matt only hesitated for a second before he held out his fist instead. He smiled, a little sad, so vulnerable. I closed my fingers one by one, then placed them gently against his eternally bruised knuckles. Then, just because I could, I even made one of my little Star Wars noises, a woosh of a lightsaber or of an explosion, it didn’t matter, Matt would never know the difference. I held my fist against his for a second too long, one extra second of us the way it should be, then I turned to walk away, one step at the time.

I stopped on the landing, looked back, I wasn’t sure at what. Matt smiled and nodded, encouraging I hoped. I needed to do this, alone. He knew it too.

As far as goodbyes went, I told myself that this was not our worst. I just hoped it wouldn’t be our last. That I’d get a chance to hello again someday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finishing off a half-written chapter that I started writing months ago was HARD. I do apologize if this chapter was not quite right because of it. I'm already toying with the chapters coming after this one, so hopefully the next update won't be this late.
> 
> Chances are that I'm continuing this story for one reader only, but that's enough for me. I only ever needed one person to talk back from the big blank void that is the internet. So special thanks to Angelo500 for giving me the will to love this story again.


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